by Grace Paley
Feelings in the Presence of the Sight and Sound of the Bread and Puppet Theater
ADMIRATION
Oh! Ah! The gorgeousness the solemn size the humorous disparities
HAPPINESS
Sheer happiness just plain happiness
RESTFULNESS
In some of the long slow pieces often of holy intention—rest—the spirit—also the body rests inside the event the work-with room and permission for absence. The gathering of knowledge at the “five senses’ entry to the soul”—so with rest comes thought—time—room for thinking during the work not only after it.
ARTISTIC INSPIRATION
Why not speak the truth directly? Just speak out! Speak to! Why not?
POLITICAL INSPIRATION
Why not speak the truth directly? Just speak out! Speak up! Speak to! Why not?
CORROBORATION
Yes! That’s just what’s happening.
ENVY
Because the work is so useful the courage of its usefulness in a long period when usefulness was mocked Envy as an artist for the beauty and usefulness of the huge puppet figures like legends out of history the gray women of suffering the ridiculous evil Uncle Fatso the lovely oxen turning round and round in the dance of silent beasts the white deer on the hill under the red ball of the sun the high birds bravely carried that have flown before and after us on our demonstrations and have waited fluttering in the wind outside the jails of New York Vermont Washington.
To have been useful As an Artist to the important movements of our times to have spoken out as artists for the poor, the oppressed and humiliated in Europe Africa and at home and been heard.
AND FINALLY LOVE AND GRATITUDE
for Peter Schuman and Elka Schuman and that solid core of puppeteers—also for those who came, worked with Peter for a couple of years, and then went off to Maine California France Italy Germany Ninth Street New York Brooklyn Gratitude for their gifts to us of labor and beauty from the earliest unknown days on Delancey Street when we were sometimes fewer than they—to these wonderful summer circus days in Vermont where we, their comrades and friends, meet one another in the thousands AND GRATITUDE also for the opportunity generously given to be one of them an ox a deer a stilt walker a horse a maintenance man a washerwoman.
And thanks Peter for the tens of thousands of Loaves of Bread and the music
—1981
Claire Lalone
My husband’s mother lived in Florida on the sandy shore of a small lake in the middle of an orange grove that looked something like a child’s painting, based in the color of sand, with an occasional spear of green green grass bending this way and that. She was dying and wanted to ask a couple of questions about life. We could speak to her only at lunch—briefly—and later at supper. She didn’t eat much, but it was the hour of her little strength and she offered it to us.
One evening at supper she asked me about Women’s Lib. She and her best friend (also very sick) had been talking about it. She said she thought I might know something about it. What was it like? Did it mean there would be women lawyers?
Yes.
Would they work for women?
Oh surely, I said.
Would women get paid the same? Was that the idea?
One of them, I answered. Equal pay at least.
Would women be free of men bossing them around?
Hopefully, I said. Though it might take the longest amount of time, since it would involve lots of changes in men.
Oh they won’t like that a bit, she said. Would people love their daughters then as much as their sons?
Maybe more, I said.
Not fair again, she said slyly.
But that wasn’t all, I said. Most of the Women’s Libbers I knew really didn’t want to have a piece of the men’s pie. They thought that pie was kind of poisonous, toxic, really full of weapons, poison gases, all kinds of mean junk we didn’t even want a slice of.
She was tired. That’s a lot, she said. Then she went upstairs to sleep.
In the morning she surprised us. She came down for breakfast. I couldn’t sleep, she said. I was up all night thinking of what you said. You know, she said, there isn’t a thing I’ve done in my life that I haven’t done for some man. Dress up or go out or take a job or quit it or go home or leave. Or even be quiet or say something nice, things like that. You know, I was up all night thinking about you and especially those young women. I couldn’t stop thinking about what wonderful lives they’re going to have.
—1991
Kay Boyle
This is a short tribute to a whole life dedicated and rededicated, day and night, to making good literature. For Kay Boyle it started in 1902.
Kay says, “Should we go out to lunch?”
“What about your back?”
“It’s only about six blocks Grace, how’s your foot?”
“Oh well, okay, okay, let’s go.”
Kay is about eighty. I’m about sixty-something. Walk and talk, arm in arm, my favorite way for talk, best for listening, this story and that. The first thing she wants to straighten out with me is this feminism business. Now, I’m kind of adamant on this subject, kind of deep-minded, but narrow. She knows that, and she tells me that in the early eighties her grandmother took her two young children out of Topeka, Kansas, alone in a buggy, and then a train brought her into Washington, where she became the first woman to—
I interrupt, “She was some woman. Her life supported yours. Maybe even invented yours.”
Kay laughs. She’s able to laugh. It’s been a number of years—ten, fifteen probably—since she tried to prevent a group of San Francisco State graduate students who wanted to do their studies on Tillie Olsen. They wanted to organize a women’s caucus.
“Why did you do that, Kay, then, why did you do that?” I ask.
“But you don’t know the facts, Grace. Sometime I’ll tell you.”
“I do know the facts.”
But by this time I love her anyway. I knew that many extremely successful self-made women think, until the day they die, that they are self-made. But I’m sad, knowing her work is unknown, was unknown, for years, for important years, to that great reading public: political women. Important years to Kay Boyle and to the women. Because there she was, near, at the end of her story, over thirty-five books, columns, essays, fast book reviews, long critical reviews, novels, potboilers, short stories, a literary writer with a long enough reputation to rise and fall, rise again. A courageous model for women and men in literature and engaged in politics. A woman who had six children, paid attention to them sometimes, ignored them often, supported them frequently with nasty writing jobs, hard times. Hurt their feelings, made them desperately in love with her. Often they were full of the rage and psychological hatred with which our moment in social history comforts us.
Then she told me the story of the McCarthy years, under investigation with her husband in Germany, Joseph Frankenstein, who lost his job, his career in the foreign service. The way in which The New Yorker had betrayed her, gone to press with the profile by Janet Flanner. It was hard to think of that magazine in this way, as fearful—of what and of whom? She said her husband wanted nothing to do with the struggle against the accusations. But she insisted. It was essential that they fight back with others. These were events she wanted me to know about. She didn’t tell me too much about her early life. She didn’t speak to me about the periodicals This Quarter, Broom, and The Dial, all those earlier avant-garde journals, most of them having their first lives in France. That was all in the books anyway and I could read all that.
She was a true worker, too. Apart from her incredible literary productivity, which occasionally upset her publishers, unable to keep up with her at the rate she wanted (which was immediate publication on completion). She was a fine teacher. I saw her at work at Bowling Green and in Spokane at Eastern Washington University, talking in great detail with each student, listening. I was surprised, her listening in that way. Spending hours at her
home, which was then a motel room, smoky, cold, cold. She was at least eighty at that time, broke, earning her own living. “It is hard,” she admitted, and then she said something she probably said many, many times, “But, Grace, remember this. Depression is cowardice.”
There is a way that she was mocked as a person flying from cause to cause, and I know that mockery myself. Maybe that’s why I was asked to speak for her today. Otherwise I don’t know exactly. But I will say, “Kay, it was luck for me that we met that cold sleety day in front of a fancy Sixth Avenue hotel.” Very cold day, side by side, and I think Muriel Rukeyser, her good friend, was with us. While inside, people were talking about peace and Iran, and how long the war would go on. How important to a successful political vigil really nasty weather is.
But I looked at this woman, known by me long ago, long admired, doing work I had barely begun myself. So straight. She had that great posture from standing up, I think, to assorted villains and fools. Sometimes the collective bully of the state (ours); sometimes the single-minded nastiness of fools.
Once, a few years ago, her physical back—of muscle, bone, and cartilage, disks, whatever physical backs are made of—broke. Her back broke. Her spiritual back hustled up all its intransigence and truthfulness to repair its physical self in just a couple of months. It took that much time, but it was after all not such a young back. So that was then, that was when we took a walk. Just after that healing, after her back was broken—and she worried about my foot.
—1994
V / Later
I originally called “The Gulf War” article “Something about the Peace Movement, Something about People’s Right Not to Know.” I wrote that the Gulf War was brilliantly constructed to prove that hundreds of thousands of men (and some women) could be moved quickly into war and out. The makers of the war believed that American war fervor could last at least three, four months. A longer war and the dreaded Vietnam Syndrome would set in (the name given to intelligent war hatred). I did not emphasize enough the way that the Pentagon needs or thinks it needs a war to test new weapons, to use up old ones, so they can order new ones. I give a couple of examples in the article, but this morning a new one appeared: There is now an ammunition doused or injected with uranium—something that had to be tested apparently; its old awful nature is not described (or remembered), for some reason.
It seems that anyone—a scientist, a military man, an ordinary citizen—would have said, That stuff is dangerous. But like all the endless nuclear tests aboveground, belowground, the awfulness was not awe-full enough.
“Connections” is a talk I gave, a Phi Beta Kappa speech at a Harvard graduation which also happened to be my husband’s fiftieth reunion, and I was in the position of addressing his classmates, some of whom I considered responsible for the Vietnam War and probably other wars. They were, in fact, the people to whom he wrote during his two-week fast in ’65 while he waited to hear their excuses for our bombing of Vietnam’s forests and rice paddies. Of course there were as many in his class who were opposed to that war—probably more—and there were many not present; they had been killed in the Second World War.
“Questions” is a preface to a remarkable collection of photographs, Pictures of Peace. As you will see, as I thought about the book, looking into it again and again, a couple of pagefuls of questions about this simple difficult project, this hopeful collection, came into my mind.
I tell, in my piece on menopause, “How Come?,” about the writer who called to criticize me for neglecting that subject in my stories. That writer was the wonderful, smart, dream-making, language-loving British author Angela Carter. After I apologized and said I’d surely get it into the next story no matter what, she told me about her severe discomfort and pain. The young doctor, a woman in her early thirties who had examined her a couple of days earlier, had told Angela (white-haired) that she would simply have to accept aging. I think now that her dismissed pain was the beginning of the cancer that killed her in the next couple of years. A friend not to be seen again—three or four books at least (probably already in her head) not to be written, never to be read.
“Across the River,” “Life in the Country,” and “In a Vermont Jury Room”: these come as close as I’ve been able to come to my Vermont life. In prose, at any rate—I have lots of flower poems, however, and cows, but not enough lifetime left to deepen my understanding of rural life or to sharpen my ear and tongue to speak the language. I have, however, always been involved to some modest degree in the town’s troubles and opinions, among my neighbors and at town meetings—school budgets, boards, recycling, river pollution, and the tragedy of the dairy farmer’s losses and therefore the town’s.
In “Upstaging Time,” I didn’t know how to write about aging and tried this interview method as a kind of opposition of the two sentimentalities: “Oh, old age! It’s so sad!” and “Wow! Is it great! You’ll like it!”
The Gulf War
One Saturday in late March 1991: The Gulf War has ended. The Iraqis, retreating, have been bombed and strafed on their road home, having unwisely turned their backs to us. The war is not over.
I am walking with my women friends. They are a group that calls itself WIMPs: Women Indict Military Policies. They’re a part of the peace movement that thinks about peace even when the newspapers say there’s no war. We’re walking single file, led by a solemn drumbeat through the streets of our neighborhood in lower Manhattan. Our postwar signs say IS THE MIDDLE EAST MORE STABLE NOW? One sign has a picture of an Iraqi child. Across his chest the words Collateral Damage are superimposed.
We’re surprised when people thank us for our flyers and for our presence in the streets. Every now and then, some old-fashioned person says, “Go back to Russia.” Or a modern fellow says, “Go kiss Saddam’s ass.” But we’re in New York, where the yellow ribbons that have tied our country into a frightened sentimental knot are not so prevalent.
I’ve been in the U.S. peace or antiwar movement since before the Vietnam War, the mid-1950s. In fact, the Vietnam War interrupted the work many people were doing in trying to end militarism and prevent nuclear war and nuclear proliferation.
In 1961 I was invited to join a group called the Greenwich Village Peace Center, founded by the American Friends Service Committee, which with its customary wisdom left us alone to figure out the consensus, nonviolence decentralized or direct action. We had come from neighborhood concerns: schools, parks, transport. Many of us had children and were worried about the nuclear tests that were sending radioactivity into the air—particularly strontium 90, which traveled through air, to grass, to cows, to our children’s milk. We didn’t like the arms race, which, during air-raid drills, forced our children to hide under school desks. We were not so much understanding as experiencing the connections. We had, I suppose, been scratching around furiously under the oppression of McCarthyism and were glad to have come together in an autonomous way that was also sensible and communal.
One day our friend and board member Dr. Otto Nathan1 said, “You know, there is the beginning of a war in Southeast Asia in a country, very small, called Vietnam. We are now in there with advisers—all kinds of soldiers. Soon—who knows?—we have to pay attention.”
We did pay attention a couple of weeks later by holding a meeting and discussion (not called a teach-in yet). Just an educational event at a local church, well attended—and then our slow work began as the war itself slowly gathered its political and military determination to slaughter a million Vietnamese as well as 58,000 Americans.
* * *
Now I will tell you something about the ways we organized against this war—how roughly 3,500 events were successfully hidden from other Americans and the world; how it was shaken by the terrible accumulating speed of the Gulf War. It’s as though the war itself was one of those smart weapons, tested in vicious electoral campaigns and used in this case to eliminate the peace movement and its national and historical accomplishment, the Vietnam Syndrome. At this moment of trium
ph, with 300 Americans and 100,000 Iraquis dead, the President announced that he had indeed extinguished the peace movement and ended the Vietnam Syndrome. Was the main purpose of the Gulf War to bathe the American conscience in blood so as to give it a taste for blood? Well, certainly that was one of its purposes.
The peace movement itself is a valuable old fact, unstable at its broadest constituency, rock-solid at its center. It lives, as many readers know—broad or narrow—in our rich, powerful, somewhat backward, secretly poor, racist, uncomfortably large democratic nation, the United States—which is also cranky and righteous. The elections every four years are considered the final responsibility of citizenship, though usually only about 50 percent of registered voters vote. That’s why it takes an awful lot of time and nerve for people to speak up. (That’s why a short war is best.) If, on a street corner while giving out flyers, you ask someone why they don’t speak up, they are apt to say they don’t need to, we’re already a democracy. Our two political parties, smiling proudly at one another, enable us to demand lots of pluralism in other countries.2
Now, how should I describe how this war’s peace movement happened? There were already women and men innocently joyful about the end of the Cold War (me too), believing we’d come to that moment in our lifetimes when serious expensive internal problems could be addressed. The Panama invasion was a bad sign, but if you work in any oppositional movement you will be opposed vigorously. (This surprises some people.) We didn’t expect things to be easy, but we had added hope to the personality, if not the character, of our work. The continuing antiwar workers were doing the usual antimilitarism work—opposing the arms budget (much of it hidden in costs of old wars; hidden, too, in the Energy Department budget), fighting underground testing, conducting classes in nonviolence, anti-recruitment drives in high schools. And a boycott of war toys. It seemed clearer with each administration decision that President Bush and his warrior companions had drawn their first line in the sandbox in a tough school, and they hadn’t changed too much—in action or in boy language.