In an interview in 1984, Grace Paley was asked about her youthful experiences with civil disobedience. Recalling how she and her neighbors refused to allow buses through or real estate development around Washington Square Park in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, Paley responded: “One of the things I learned was stubbornness. And I’ve thought more and more that that’s the real meaning of nonviolent civil disobedience—to be utterly and absolutely stubborn.” The title that she has given this collection of essays, stories, speeches, introductions, poems, and remembrances confirms that this is a writer who is proud of the fact that, in the course of a long and productive life, she has never changed her mind.

“My family was a rather typical Socialist Jewish family,” Paley relates about her childhood in the Bronx. Other children fought over sports or clothes, but the children in her world fought over Stalin and Trotsky. Although her parents were not religious—her father refused, to attend synagogue—the family thought of itself as Jewish in an ethical and cultural sense. Jews, as Paley writes, “were supposed to be better” than others. And the political outlook that she absorbed from her extended kin was remarkably akin to this kind of abstract, moralistic, ecumenical Judaism.

Despite hearing tales of family conflicts between anarchists, socialists, and communists from the old country, Paley was never sectarian in the ways of the City College intellectuals of Alcove I and Alcove II. As a child she had no doubt—and she continues to show no doubt—that her idealistic, romantic, and proudly impractical leftism makes her a better person than those war-making, planet-destroying, female-hating, violence-prone, money-making men whom she is determined to confront. Paley’s early demonstrations at Washington Square were inspired by the same tenaciously held beliefs that motivated her later feminism and her attacks on America’s involvement in the Persian Gulf: power is bad, the downtrodden are good, and the duty of the left is to speak for the truth of the latter against the hypocrisies of the former.

A society such as America’s ought to admire folks who stand back and resist, and Paley clearly offers her book to be admired. Compared to the sterile theoreticians of the tenured class, Paley’s lack of pretension is certainly refreshing. When she criticizes leftists who send their children to private schools, who can doubt that she sent her own children to public schools? She is not that kind of “progressive” whose denunciation of power masks a craving to exercise it. Paley’s radicalism is of the old-fashioned sort: anti-materialist, a bit Puritanical, committed to action. Dividing her time between Greenwich Village and Vermont, she carries forward a tradition of dissent shaped by the bohemian radicals who gravitated to the former and by the pacifists such as Scott Nearing who made the latter his home.

Yet the adjectives that Paley uses to describe her stubbornness—“utterly,” “absolutely”—give pause. Can we ever be completely sure that our positions are the correct ones? Ought we to admire absolutism in politics, no matter how idealistic its motives? Surely stubbornness is not among the most attractive or the most elevated of human qualities. The stubborn person is often an ignorant person, and willfully so. Here I stand and nothing will move me: it sounds like passion, but what about all the discordant data of the lived world? Dogma cannot be defeated dogmatically.

To be stubborn, moreover, is all but to proclaim one’s hostility to democracy, for the resister intentionally chooses not to listen to the persuasions of others. Most serious of all, though, for a person whose reputation is based upon the writing of poetry and fiction, is the mental limitation that stubbornness represents. To prize stubbornness is to diminish development, to deny variety, as if it were not important, or not the duty of a really serious mind, to correct or to put aside the beliefs of one’s youth in the light of what one learns through exposure and experience. Fidelity must never be mindless. Mules are not the best role models for human beings, especially for those who take it upon themselves to lecture others in the ways of the world.

Since she is so defiantly resistant to change, Paley tells her readers far more about her version of left-wing politics than she intends. She views herself as a prophet railing against the injustices of the world around her. Yet her book can be read as a demonstration of why the kind of leftist politics she embodies is so unappealing to the majority of Americans.

The Bronx of Grace Paley’s youth no longer spawns aspiring Jewish writers. Greenwich Village is too expensive to be the center of any kind of radicalism. The nonconformists of Vermont have left Ben and Jerry’s do-goodism behind to fight furiously over the distribution of property taxes. All this can be lamented; but before shedding too many tears over the fact that America destroys its radical breeding grounds, we ought first to recognize the benefits of having fewer writers and intellectuals as complacently convinced of their righteousness as Grace Paley.

“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.” Paley’s words come from one of the first talks that she ever gave, a mid-’60s effort to explain her craft to aspiring women writers. Whatever one thinks about her literary point—my own taste in writers leans toward those who are also critics—it offers an explanation of her career as a political activist’. For the activist, unlike the writer, is a critic, of society rather than of literature. Should the critic, like the writer, live in the world? Paley’s unambiguous answer is that she should not. For the world is unjust, and any effort to accommodate oneself to it, even by trying to understand it; threatens one’s moral purity.

The dangers in such a rejection of the world are obvious, though they are not obvious to Paley. One of them is the likelihood of getting reality wrong. Is it really true that one in three women in America will be raped in the course of her lifetime? Are there really “gangs of politicians and medical men” in this country who are prepared to sterilize women for “the country’s good”? Do “tens of thousands of American women live much of their lives in cages”? Was it correct to say in 1986 that “the objective facts of world events right now are worse than at any other time”? Did the House of Representatives truly receive a “terrible shock” when Vermonters elected a socialist to join their ranks? Are the elderly truly discriminated against in America?

All these questions have factual answers, but the radical critic is not interested in knowing what the factual answers are. Why should she, if things are just as she thought? Defiantly cut off from the world, the radical critic is also cut off from any obligation to make statements about the world that can be verified. I appreciate the art of a great storyteller when I am reading a work of the imagination, but social and political criticism is not entirely, or even mainly, a work of the imagination, and stories are not really what I want from someone who is trying to instruct me about what is wrong with the world.

Paley does not generally understand the difference. She begins and ends many of her talks with stories or poems, often in ways that make it hard to distinguish between what is offered as timeless insight into the human condition and what is offered as an account of a particular historical reality or an analysis of a concrete condition. One such effort is called “A Midrash on Happiness,” originally delivered at a conference organized by Tikkun magazine. (“I don’t think this is really a midrash,” she breezily announces, “but I called it that.”) The main character of the story, Faith, is torn between her personal happiness and the ugliness of the world around her. Faith desperately wants women friends with whom she can discuss

on the widest, deepest, and most hopeless level the economy, the constant, unbeatable, cruel war economy, the slavery of the American worker to the idea of that economy, the complicity of male people in the whole structure, the dumbness of men (including her preferred man) on this subject.

All this is told by way of introduction to Paley’s autobiographical reminiscences about her beginnings in the Bronx. No doubt her sympathetic audience loved the story; but I could not help thinking that Paley was taking the liberty of using an imaginary situation to offer a rhetorically overloaded and generally incorrect analysis of America.

Alas, Paley’s version of leftist radicalism has become little more than a story itself. In this work of the imagination, America and all that it stands for is bad and all the countries that challenge its power are good. Only a storyteller could write in Paley’s gushing terms about the idyll of North Vietnam. “Water spinach,” she exclaims, is “a wonderful vegetable.” And only a fabulist could write about her fellow writer Christa Wolf and never discuss her work for the East German secret police.

It is fitting, if also sad, that it takes an imaginative writer such as Paley to illuminate so many of the reasons for the left’s failures in America. For it is clear that people who think like Paley are far more comfortable telling stories to each other—they live, as Paley piously puts it, in literature—than they are dealing with reality. Still, there is one interesting story in Paley’s life, though she never tells it in this book. Her family’s roots were in the socialist left, not the communist left; and socialists have been our most effective truth-tellers about communism. Yet Paley, reared in this honorable tradition, somehow succumbed to precisely the sort of double-standard approach to other countries that so thoroughly discredited communism as a moral force in American life.

The impolite word for this sort of thing is lying. I do not think that Grace Paley intentionally distorts the truth, but I do think that she embodies a variety of radicalism that has consistently placed its cause before any obligation to be scrupulous about its motives, its analyses, and its plans. In a charming little piece from 1973, Paley announces her ideological opposition to cookbooks. This comes as no surprise, for cookbooks codify rules, and rules are anathema to the anarchistically inclined. The only problem is that Paley offers her admonition against cookbooks in a preface to a cookbook. It is a trivial example, but in its way it is a revealing illustration of how the American left has come to raise itself above the consideration of its own inconsistencies and inadequacies. Cookbooks, of course, are not evil; and neither, by the way, are rules. How much more honest it would be for the left to admit that it actually likes things (cookbooks, for example) that the rest of America also likes! But then it would have to surrender its condescension, which it mistakes for a critical standpoint.

Paley, no doubt, would protest my depiction of her as indifferent to if not actively contemptuous of, obligations to truth. “It is the poet’s responsibility to speak truth to power … to learn truth from the powerless,” she ringingly advises younger writers. In the various plots that Paley offers, the dissenter is invariably sustained by her conviction that power corrupts, and so she, the opponent of power, occupies the ethical high ground. About her own thinking, you see, there is no occasion for skepticism. Everything is just as she thought. She is the complacent enemy of complacency.

In 1982, a group of female peace activists decided to demonstrate at the Pentagon, and Paley was called upon to write the “Women’s Pentagon Action Unity Statement” that defined their objectives. Of all the materials collected in her book, this is the most detailed in its contrast between the purported evil of America’s policymakers and the purported goodness of those who contest them. War planners, bankers, and corporate executives are connected by “gold and oil,” Paley wrote, while feminists, ecologists, and pacifists “are made of blood and bone … of the sweet and finite resource, water.” “We know there is a healthy, sensible, loving way to live,” the statement concluded, promising, in typical Paley fashion, that “if we are here in our stubborn thousands today, we will certainly return in the hundreds of thousands in the months and years to come.”

It never occurs to Paley that her views may not be quite as moral as she thinks, even when direct evidence of their possible amorality—even, on occasion, of their possible immorality—is presented to her. A moral person, confronted with choices all of which are compelling but not all of which are right, searches for an appropriate way to distinguish the one from the other. But Paley has little taste for that kind of reflection.

Consider her essay about an abortion that she had back in the days when they were illegal. Reflecting her admirably pre-Yuppie brand of radical politics, Paley admits to not liking the slogan “abortion on demand,” for it trivializes what she acknowledges is “a very serious thing to undertake.” The real question, she continues, is the stage of your pregnancy; treating abortion as just one more surgical procedure to be demanded or not demanded as the consumer sees fit ignores the fact that a six-month pregnancy is morally different than a one-month pregnancy. But after introducing these important points, Paley goes on to endorse … abortion on demand. “Not that I think if a woman goes to a clinic and wants to have an abortion, she shouldn’t have it when she needs it,” she writes. “It’s just that there’s a lot to think about.” But none of that thinking is done here: Moral reasoning must never interfere with feminist solidarity.

An even more striking example of Paley’s political approach to morality involves her truly bizarre position on the question of whether Americans ought to have been permitted to adopt Vietnamese children whose parents had been killed or lost in the war. Thundering with righteousness, she denounces the fact that “handicapped, war-mutilated children had been taken from a country where it would be the responsibility of family and community to keep them functioning in the ordinary life of the world.” Not only were they uprooted from their natural home, “they were brought into a society which specializes in institutions, dumping grounds for the handicapped and the old, whose own Vietnam veterans are hidden in the recesses of Veterans Administration hospitals, whose black or handicapped orphans are unadoptable.” It galls Paley that “children who might be subjected to racial prejudice were being sent to the United States, the center of that pathology.”

Everything that is wrong with Paley’s worldview is nicely represented in this diatribe. Her father, she writes, was happy to come to America, which he viewed as a land of freedom, but Paley, growing up here, can only describe her society in the most negative of terms. Her weird notion that there are hidden veterans in America betrays a conspiratorial mentality that differs little from those conservatives who believe that there are American soldiers still closeted away in Vietnam. Her romanticization of wartime Vietnam, as if that devastated society still had flourishing families and communities, reinforces the reader’s uneasy feeling that Paley was against the airlift of Vietnamese children to the United States for no other reason than that the communist government of North Vietnam was also against it.

“I must say that I don’t believe women could have invented the insane idea of transporting these children,” Paley writes. This makes it all the more striking that, after her article was published, one Suzanne Dosh of Lakewood, Colorado responded in a letter (which Paley reprints) that she was “appalled by the misinformation and lopsided reporting” in Paley’s account of the issue. Dosh pointed out, quite sensibly, that these children were totally abandoned through no fault of their own. As many as 80 percent of those left behind died, and the rest of these children were consigned to orphanages. Would Paley have abandoned a nine-year-old boy half-killed by American bombs, a half-black infant with severe nerve damage, a sick asthmatic boy, or a Montagnard girl so sick that she was left for death? All four of those children, Dosh told Paley, happen to have been adopted by her. It is women, by and large, who love and care for such children, Dosh concluded. “Their reverence for a single human life crossed national, cultural, racial, social, religious, political and economic boundaries.”

It is not very difficult to establish the real moral heroine of this tale. For Paley’s support of a lawsuit designed to stop the airlift of the Vietnamese children—an action that would have condemned countless numbers of children to death or poverty in the faint hope that the parents from whom they were separated might not really be dead, at a time when a sanctuary and a better life in America were available to those children—strikes me as immoral in the extreme. A person moved by moral considerations, moreover, would have been ashamed by Dosh’s response, and would have promptly apologized for her mistaken analysis.

But Paley does no such thing. After professing admiration for Dosh’s “extraordinary generosity,” she replies to her letter simply by repeating her main points, among them this one: “The Orphan Airlift was a cynical political game played by the government in the hope that drama and sentiment would persuade Americans to give military aid to Saigon and continue the war.” For Paley, a political statement always seems to take precedence over a moral statement; or, to put it differently, she is dead to the difference between them.

It is precisely this moral tone-deafness that renders Paley’s account of her meetings with Soviet dissidents so pathetic. A true revolutionary tourist, the homes that she visits in the Soviet Union remind her of her home in the Bronx. After a number of visits, she comes to love Moscow. She is delighted by GUM, which she describes as “the lively, mobbed Macy’s of Moscow.” She quotes a Russian dissident’s observation that he is treated better by the Moscow police than he would be treated by the police in America.

Paley views herself as an American dissident, and so it is essential that she should talk with Russians who oppose their own government. She imagines that they are her counterparts. Yet what results—or what should have resulted—is a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. “Thank God for the United States,” Elena Bonner exclaims to Paley when she tries to bring up America’s role in Chile; and Mrs. Sakharov also praises the anticommunist Senator Henry Jackson, and even expresses the hope that he will become president. Over and over again, the Soviet Union’s courageous dissidents try to explain to their bewildered American visitors how little they understand. So what’s an American dissident to do? Well, Paley could have joined these people on one of their demonstrations. She allows that the thought crossed her mind. But she was in Moscow as a delegate to the World Peace Congress, and there were so many meetings to attend. … Even from her own self-serving account, the reader is left in little doubt that Paley, however much she was fooling herself, fooled her Russian friends not at all. Knowing full well that any delegate to the World Peace Congress had chosen to side with the Soviet state, they treated her as the ugly American that she was.

Paley’s morality knows one point and one point only: everything that America does is immoral. Her thinking about the United States is utterly definitional. How do you feel about Nicaragua or El Salvador? people ask her. “Well, first I don’t judge them. I don’t judge other people, other nations that our government and their own have pressed beyond bearing. In the second place, how can I judge them in the position they’re in when I myself, without such experience of oppression, have lived with all the abstractions of war in my own head.” In her determination not to act as a thinking person capable of judging the behavior of people different from herself, Paley is not only tendentious and selective in her sympathies, she also underscores the extent to which the left in America has happily chosen the easy path of political sentiment over the difficult business of moral reckoning. Who else but an American radical could offer a voice of conscience unexercised by the rigors of conscience?

I know nothing about Suzanne Dosh other than the letter that she wrote to Grace Paley, but I think of her as the sort of American moved by religion and altruism to do the right thing. Most Americans would kindle to the likes of Ms. Dosh and ignore the likes of Ms. Paley. They would be correct to do so.

“Most of the pieces in this book were written because I was a member of an American movement, a tide really, that rose out of the civil-rights struggles of the fifties, rolling methods and energy into the antiwar, direct-action movements in the sixties; cresting, ebbing, as tides do, returning bold again in the seventies and eighties in the second wave of the women’s movement—and from quite early on splashed and salted by ecological education, connection, and at last action.” It is not surprising that someone who values stubbornness as a personal characteristic would see the world as stubborn. Thus, for Paley, the left of her lifetime is all of a piece. Since the left contains good ideas, and since it is populated by good people, it stretches in one unbroken line from the 1950s to the 1990s. A left is a left is a left.

Yet the evidence for a radically different interpretation, according to which the recent history of the left is not the story of one movement but of many movements, noble and cynical, is contained in Paley’s own book. I have no doubt that Paley’s early involvement with social and political protest was authentic and idealistic. Motivated by a desire to do good, she can be easily pictured standing relatively alone, holding her placard, offering herself as a witness against injustice and hypocrisy. In the 1950s and 1960s, there really was what Paley calls “an American movement,” an incipient, religiously inspired, uncorrupted outburst against racism at home and imperial ambitions abroad; and she was among its finest representatives.

But something happened to that movement in the late 1960s. Corrupted by its anger, fractured into its many constituents, seduced by its dreams of power, the American left put aside its goal of moral witness. Some urged violence. Others opted for careers in politics. Still others found solace in the championing of their identity. Yet no honest observer could conclude that political radicalism as it manifests itself in the late 1990s has much in common with the innocent anarchism and the sweet pacifism of the early 1960s. No longer committed to being the voice of truth, skeptical of morality, hostile to the ideal of a common humanity, apologetic about violence, suspicious of religion, self-absorbed, selective in its response to oppression, contemptuous of its own country’s ideals, the left for which Grace Paley tries to speak today bears little if any resemblance to the left in which Grace Paley grew up.

Now here is a story which cries out for a great storyteller. But Paley fails to tell it, and her failure to tell it suggests that she may not be so stubborn after all. Someone true to the radicalism of her youth would have produced a very different book than this one. That other book, the one that Paley did not write, would have been just as committed to pacifism and the hatred of injustice as this one, but it would have expressed the voice of someone for whom truth and morality still mattered. In so doing, it would have understood, as this book does not understand, that an American movement is a part of America, that both the country and its dissenters have their spots of pride and their spots of shame, their good people and their bad people, their stories worth celebrating and their stories worth condemning. And so Paley’s sentimental and sanctimonious book inadvertently exposes what went wrong with the American left. Since she is sure that everything is just as she thought, she has nothing to teach about how the left can be set right.