Judith Cohen

Memories of Grace
Dinner with Grace Paley and John Cheever — A Writer’s Recollection

Forty some years ago, when I was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Grace Paley and John Cheever both came to dinner at my apartment. Picture Grace in her fifties, the stout political activist chomping on chewing gum, with her Bronx infected speech, sitting next to Cheever, in his tennis shorts while he carefully enunciated each word. A scheduling fluke had landed these illustrious writers in Provincetown on the same weekend, forcing them to share the limelight.

We sat around a long table facing stormy Cape Cod Bay, ten young writers and the mismatched celebrities. Though they had little in common, they’d each visited the Soviet Union on the government’s tab and agreed that Yuri Trifanov was a wonderful Soviet writer — that may have been their only shared opinion. (Trifanov, a ficition writer, died in Moscow in 1981.).

On the wagon by his own admission, Cheever fidgeted with obvious discomfort. “The National Book Awards are nothing more than a venue for fighting personal vendettas,” he complained. “When I was on the panel, someone nominated Love Story, just to get even with an enemy.”

The NY Times Book Review had panned his novel Bullet Park, but he wasn’t bitter, not even when they photographed him recovering from a skiing accident to prove “that I was dead as a writer.”

He had no use for experimentalists like William Gass and John Hawks. “They’ve been in academia too long,” Cheever said. “They use fiction to argue with their colleagues.”

I couldn’t tell you Grace’s views of Hawks or Gass, for she didn’t hold forth like Cheever. Instead, she worried aloud about one writing fellow’s cold, enquired about another’s children, and fretted over her grocer, who “works seventeen hours a day and never sees his wife.”

Though Cheever assured us that The New Yorker and Esquire were “dying” for good fiction. (I doubt that anyone at our table had been accepted by either.) Grace admitted that she wouldn’t send stories to sexist magazines like Playgirl. Unlike Cheever, she said she had no time for writing novels since she spent so much time on political causes. Later that evening, Cheever introduced Grace when she gave a reading. Though he admitted to often “coughing noisily when colleagues spoke,” he called Grace’s work “robust” and listened to her with quiet respect.

“In Cheever’s story “The Death of Justina,” an alcoholic advertising executive isn’t permitted to bury his wife’s great aunt Justina because their upper-crust town isn’t zoned for funeral parlors. Only by threatening the mayor, does the narrator secure a death certificate. Grace later told us, “I didn’t believe that story. That zoning laws wouldn’t allow someone to sign a death certificate isn’t a realistic premise. Now, if he’d said, ‘once there was a town where no one could die,’ then I would have believed him.”

Her treatment of death contrasts sharply with Cheever’s. In Paley’s story “Friends,” Ellen calls Faith to say that she’s dying. Faith, who suffers from uncontrolled bleeding, is certain that she, too, is dying. Despite her own troubles, she consoles Ellen. “Life isn’t that great… We’ve had nothing but crummy days and crummy guys and no money and broke all the time and nothing to do on Sunday but take the kids to Central Park and row on that lousy lake… What’s the big loss?” Faith recovers, while Ellen dies leaving Faith longing for “their difficult days praying for peace and screaming at the kids.” Paley’s women deal with pain through self-mockery, the characteristic humor of the oppressed, while Cheever’s people mock the stupidity of others.

Grace’s impact on my life reverberated long after that dinner. I visited her in Vermont where we shared lunch with her husband, the poet Robert Nichols. She praised his writing, as if she couldn’t bear being the more acclaimed spouse. If I phoned to ask for a recommendation for some grant or other, she happily consented.

After many years without contact, I went to her reading at the Library of Congress where she greeted me as if we’d just been drinking tea on her porch. There must be dozens, maybe hundreds, like me who feel as if we’re Grace’s spiritual daughters.

If there is a place where no one can die, she must be there.

 

Click for our interview with Judith.

Judith Cohen’s novel Seasons was published by The Permanent Press of Sag Harbor, New York. Excerpts appeared first in The New American Review. The book was originally published in German translation by Rowohlt of Hamburg as part of their international New Woman Series and has been reissued as an eBook.

Cohen’s new short story collection Never Be Normal is available from Atmosphere Press, September 2021. $17.99 (ISBN 978-63988-997-6.) She depicts sixties rebels, political activists, struggling couples, and singles looking for love with humor and empathy. Readers meet a Jewish bus driver in Texas, a Yoga Guru, A Palestinian peace activist, and an obese child with a terminal disease. There’s a therapist who brings a live python to his disturbed charges and a single woman who joins a scheme for borrowing married men. A feuding couple fight a forest fire on an Indian reservation. Devastated by a fatal hunting accident, another woman resists police efforts to help her, and a radical South African priest hides in Ireland. These rebels and self-identified outsiders confront their demons.

Her fiction has appeared in Cordella Magazine #13, Dash Literary Journal, FERN, Good Works Review, High Plains Literary Review, New Letters, North American Review. New Letters, High Plains Literary Review, and The Sunlight Press. After a long career as an educator at Harvard then Lesley University, both in Cambridge, Mass., she’s now a semi-retired yoga teacher.

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