Delivered at the Arts Club on Gramercy Park in Fall, 1986, when Grace Paley became the first New York State Author

The way, say, pesto can preserves a rank green summer, entire—the way my own ancestral moon shiners boiled down a whole orchard for the clear singularity of one killer sip, Grace Paley makes of much even more by compacting it. No condensation has ever been so openhanded. I, victim of elephantiasis of the novelization, won't pretend I understand. For me 700 pages is just getting started; and just to condense my respect for, my debt to, my love of Grace into six minutes is like standing up here and getting into a girdle—not a pretty sight, not even when meeting her, at age 21, back once when we were all somewhat more "stationary in the flesh."

Grace's life has been dedicated—on the page and in the picket line and at the kitchen table under the benediction of her doctor-father's still-lifes—to Justice. An impossible and necessary goal. No one I know has gotten closer to it. That said, it should be admitted that the more general our praise for her is, the more she'll squirm and groan, and so we'll try to be, as she taught us, full of feeling but removed from sentiment—we'll be specific. But anyhow, my dear, you'll just have to sit here and take it. "This won't hurt long"...as good a definition of Justice as I know.

Some sage warned us that the purity of a revolution can only last two weeks. Au contraire, we celebrate a self-regenerating exemption to that rule, and too much of funny physics—often except to the disturbing littleness of man.

Our dictionary predicted her: "Grace: seemingly effortless beauty or charm of movement, form or proportion. See synonyms at 'elegance.' A disposition to be generous or helpful: good will. Mercy; clemency. A favor rendered by one who need not do so; indulgence. A temporary immunity or exemption. Three sister goddesses who dispensed charm and beauty. Divine love and protection bestowed freely on people who did not seek it and do not actually deserve it. The state of being protected or favored by God. Used with His, Her, or Your as a title and form of address for a duke, duchess, or archbishop. In music, an improvised embellishment such as a trill; a grace note. To honor or favor as in 'You grace our table with your presence.' A short prayer of thanksgiving said before or after a meal."

Grace, in fiction, in fact, in art and politics and over dinner, the mother of us all. I used to watch Grace work, like Jane Austen, on scraps of paper she would slip into her pocket when the door squeaked, admitting students who'd never write so well as she. The paper, all amended, overlapped, with butterfly-wing flanges, Proustian crossings-out, and sideways afterthoughts, all giving off the encoded heat of a pirate map. The paper told me, with Rube Goldberg glee, that every tale is a device, engine, and gizmo. Many drivers could get theirs to roar like some V-8 engine, but few started and stopped, choked off and spun out, veered then joked and landed in dead earnest like hers, like Grace's, did. No one I know is so identified by one of their two names. There are other women on earth named Grace but they are called Grace Thus and Such, Gracie Allen, Grace Jones, Gracie Mansion. There is, for us, but one Grace. Grace, as a theological state, must arrive unbidden. It can befall you on the road to Damascus or onboard the IRT, but you will be, afterwards, not Saul but Paul. Chekhov posits writers not as Saul snitches, rule-upholders, list-listers, but Paul, the flawed correspondent and yet the designated Fuller Brush Man of the spirit. Paul then too was, like many of us here tonight, a student and beneficiary of Grace itself, herself.

Her declarative opening sentences, stepping stones that lull you into fake complacency, lead you smack into a huge sentence that's a metaphysical beer garden of sentence-ness that dumps you out saying, "Whoo!" and, like kids that use the sloosh off one of Bob Nichols' sliding boards as the starter push for returning up the stairs of descent, we circle, we at once regain it.

The true teacher defends her students against her own influence. It's a peculiar beauty of having had a great mentor that all one learned from them and with them and whilst near them clings to them in memory, feather boas they wear without noticing or sanctioning; so to think of them is, like Proust being half-asleep for the entire reign of Charles I, to regain the speedy inrush of all one gained while around them.

How I found Grace: full of feeling yet devoid of sentiment—sentiment being the fictional equivalent of water-retention—so she's left free to imply all but to write short. Protein called history, with a few carbs of nice scatter pillow, corduroy, red, got cheap and yet long-lasting. She's obsessed with justice—indeed, that might be the one-word theme of all her work—and yet, miraculously, that insistence on justice at all costs has not rendered her unfair. In class, she was capable of saying, "Oh, Joan, honey, that was silly, fun, and well done, but silly, and is there nothing outside that, holding it? I know you'll find it." To me, trapped on the tramp steamer of the 19^th century's rhetorical constructions, she was able to offer the olive branch in a way so chummy that I cannot quite recall, these 25 years later, her exact words. "Oh hon, it's not about that, it's more about how people learn to live in groups, or don't, and what they'll give up to get their way, and everything they sacrifice by winning." Or something. I knew exactly what she meant; I literally ran from her office and, awash in dependent clauses and authorial drag, I bolted up the stairs to my dorm room and typed out the first true work, in sentences declarative and short yet pushy, about people related by blood but little else. I would later publish that story. It was as if, led by some stranger's dowsing rod, I'd uncovered, on land I owned, a well that itself flooded onto all streams underground on earth—a freshet that once found, would prove inexhaustible, and yet if never pointed out, was likely to go undetected. It's been said that we never learn anything we didn't know already. How often have we, encountering some information wholly unfamiliar, felt geometry's underpinning, the deja vu—deja new—of this. As we say, after the age of 45, to the morning's first mirror, "Oh. You again?"

It was me again all over, but accompanied by forebears who seemed, as in Grace's own stories, like providing spirits, shtetl sages rendered briefly as streetcart shmucks by a culture too self-involved to give credit but too busy to bother, and therefore willing to forgive. Just as Paley's stories—playground altercations and second marriage breakfasts—always seemed played out on the great chessboard of human history, the vast migrations and little disturbances of man, so her teaching always seemed to place us, flawed, pretty, pink shrimp, as a wave, the next wave in a long procession, and instead of diminishing our value and scope, it seemed, once you thought about it (and I did), to ennoble our measly efforts, to see this time in history as being as good as any. Her own trangressive attempts at black speech, in "The Little Girl," are almost uncanny in their essentializing knack for rendering the general habits without enslavement to a system. The purity of a revolution, perfected like the tumbler turning in a lock, but always somehow the tumbler opening, the door unlatched.

"A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice...[We] speak of style, of the army of words, of the army in which all kinds of weapons may come into play. No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place." Babel.

Suddenly I was surrounded by about three hundred blacks.

Who you?

Who that?

Look at her! Just look! When you seen a fatter ass?

Poor thing. She ain't right. Leave her, you boys, you bad boys.

I used to live here, I said.

Oh yes, they said, in the white old days. That time too bad to last.

But we loved it here. We never went to Flatbush Avenue or Times Square. We loved our block.

Tough black titty.

I like your speech, I said. Metaphor and all.

Right on. We get that from talking.

In 1968, in gray ocean just past the duckweed-y delta of Vietnam, onboard the carrier U.S.S. Yorktown, amid a bumper crop of 4,000 other boys 18 to 20 who wanted to be most anywhere else, in the barbershop where my crime of a haircut was renewed biweekly, beneath a stack of much-thumbed Playboys, I found—I swear to God—a copy of "Vogue." And in it, a story by Grace Paley. I think. Maybe some guy's wife left it onboard during visitor's day, or maybe I bought it myself, retail. (I wouldn't put it past me, but if so, I would never have been reading it in the barbershop.) What I do recall is knowing, in my every, secretly civilian corpuscle, that this was the way to do it now, tell stuff today—sing and cajole, eavesdrop and accuse. What was left out made the masts left in more visible and pure. I had studied painting before the war, and I'd loved Henry Moore's work, and I knew that the holes in his were a truer subject than the masses describing, underwriting eloquent silence at the center of the work. Okay. But the article after the story concerned a Ms. Paley, too. Babe Paley, wife of the CBS president and one of those ladies bent on elongation, whippet waists and cushions, jewelry and the will to become the emblem of all ease. Somehow, in my offshore isolation, and for want of anybody to consult in that rank hair-oil, testosterone-scented barbershop, I conflated these two improbables. If the story, with the wit of the street, seemed huge in miracle, that miracle was enlarged by the seeming leisure of its author—the one exception to genius having, like Mozart, a weakish chin: Here was a genius that looked like the muse of one. I, a primitive, a sailor, fell in love with the language of one and the languor of the other, and provided the odd bridges between. This is true. I could not make this up. Well, actually, I could, but the world being the world and Grace being Grace, I needn't.

Eighteen months later, released from a war Grace Paley had spent ending, I turned up to work with her. I had been teaching myself to write, incorrectly of course, but with the stupid frontal originality of the self-taught, and certainly with energy. Having been drafted by Disturbances of Man, I was overripe for enormous changes. I enrolled at Sarah Lawrence and soon scouted the campus for my swan, my whippet, my pedicure, the woman who topped the annual list as Best Dressed Woman in the World and yet who could write like Emma Lazarus, Issac Babel, and everybody local combined. Once I was introduced, at the health food bar, to Grace Paley, in person, I understood my long mistake. I soon understood that if it was unlikely that Grace might look, or want to look, like Babe Paley, it was even more unthinkable that Babe could ever write with the brusque stoop and sage wit of Grace. No one could do what she did, and no one on earth could make less mean more.

The class was what Pope called "harmonied confusion," a basement War Resisters League meeting with too many good ideas underwriting a purity that rarely lasts longer than two weeks. In our group, the daughter of a Kennedy appointee who had first called television a "vast wasteland," a girl from Michigan who talked baby talk, and a former ambulance driver who told us how body lice evacuate, in orderly queues, a dead human body. Not quite presiding—or not quite seeming to—Grace lifted from the several conversations a line here or there, holding it aloft, then releasing it. She conducted the class the way an orchestra is unified by a single traction rhythm, and somehow we honored and heard each other more perfectly in imitation of her. It was hard, in conference, to be alone with Grace for long. The phone was ringing; it was either Sybil or Newsweek. It was the kid of a friend, a kid in trouble who could only talk to her; it was the next appointee early. But in those minutes of looking over the words one had written, what was transmitted could work, like her fiction, on the principle of metaphysical condensation. I don't begin to understand it, but I've never stopped feeling its power in my life.

It's been said that we never learn anything we didn't already know. Grace would point out a literal fact of my habitual composition, some 19th century elaboration. She said once, "It's not about surface, it's more about how much people have to sacrifice to be with other people so they won't sacrifice everything to being alone. It's going to take place at the spot where they leave off being "I" and ease into "We," and then quick back again." I would love to know the actual two sentences she said. I can tell you, though, their effect on me. I ran, literally ran, back to my gothic-y dorm, and while still running, rolled white paper into my Hermes portable typewriter and—that simple, that long into wanting it—simply started. Simply started my work. Something in her Gordian preemptiveness and genius aimed me, and every word after that was it, whereas everything before had not been. I don't understand. But I would spend 15 years of my life as a teacher trying to replicate for at least one student what Grace had somehow done for me. Certain debts, literal, can only be repaid in barter; certain kinds of kindness—grace—can only be repaid in kind.