A Conversation with My Father

                                                        Grace Paley

                                           
                 

 
                                                                  Question # 1
                        What is the standard story according to the writer’s father?

                                The writer’s father was an old man of eighty-six years. He was suffering from many diseases and most of the time he lay on his bed. His heart couldn’t do certain things but the glow of thinking faculty kept it luminous all the time. He was a vigorous old man who wasn’t ready to accept the infirmities of old age and tried to live a mentally active life. One day he called his daughter, Grace Paley and asked her to write a story in tradition of the old great writers like Checkov, Maupassant and Turgenev. He wanted a plain story with a proper start, middle and ending. The standard story in the view of writer’s father was one that was simple and direct. It dealt with the common familiar characters and then went on… as what happened to them next. The story had simple tragedy expressing the woes and grief of general life. The realism was the keynote of a standard story in his view. The sad story never permitted a single joke and it was completely tragic.
   
                                                                 Question # 2
                                    What type of story did Grace Paley write?

                     Grace Paley chose a woman who lived near her home as the subject matter of her story. She was well acquainted with the lady and her circumstances. The first story that she wrote on her father’s bidding was very brief and didn’t satisfy all the queries arising in the reader’s mind. She wrote … there lived a lady who had a son. When her son was about fifteen he became a drug addict. His mother too started to take drugs so that she can get closer to the youth culture and her son shouldn’t feel alone. But after some time the boy turned away from the drugs and came to normal life. He left his mother in disgust who was hopeless and alone in her grief.
     Her father rejected this story for being incomplete and superficial. He pointed out that she didn’t state anything about the appearance of the lady or the boy. She didn’t mention about the presence of boy’s father or whether he was born out of matrimony. She should have told about the background of the lady because it helps to profess a character’s future actions. Her father asked her to write the story again. The second story was a bit detailed but lacked the proper style and tone suitable for a tragic story.
        In it she answered the questions of their looks, parentage and temperaments. She further described the events in a bit detailed way. The end was twisted and the lady was shown to have left the drugs and practically reconciled to normal life by working in a hospital as a receptionist.
        Her father was very dissatisfied at this story too and told her that she wasn’t able to understand the basic rules for writing a simple story of simple people’s simple life. So he advised her not to waste her time on such a futile effort.

                                                                  Question # 3
   Why could she not write the story according to the rules followed by great writers of the past?

                        The story basically presents an important fact before the reader making him aware of the subtleties of changing times. Writer’s father wanted her to write a story with clarity and certainty. But the writer couldn’t do so in spite of her efforts. She couldn’t simplify the facts of modern life. Her story was no doubt, real but it didn’t comply with any of the traditions of the story writing followed by the great writers of the past. The literature imitates the contemporary society, not in the theme only but in the technique too. Society can be perfectly reflected in the mirror of literature. So the literature of a specific time represents its moods, pace and values properly. The writers of the past wrote clear and well-knit stories because they were living in a time that had certainty and values. Today the time has changed; the societies have widened so much that no one knows even about his neighbours. The hassle and rush of society has left no clarity or conviction in the world. The things have become emotionless and mechanical. The looks and other facts are considered useless in a modern story. We see many contemporary stories with anonymous characters in anonymous settings presenting general problems of current society. The earlier writers described a pure tragedy but today purity of everything has been spoiled. As now people face a lot of troubles and tragedies without much feelings and the reason is the excess of such incidents in modern state of affairs. The tragedies of mass level have become very frequent. Revolutionary political changes and migrations have poisoned a man’s existence to its extreme level. Wars and the fear of war have diminished the importance of any individual’s tragedy. That’s why the writer couldn’t give importance to the simple and plain facts of an individual’s life but her father didn’t understood these changes in the objective conditions of modern life. His disapproval of her writing style was basically a rejection of modernity and it was his inability to understand the current trends of life and their demands.
         Therefore we can’t say that this or the other rule for writing is absolute because the world goes on changing and literature tends to follow the pace of this change. Consequently, the techniques undergo a decisive change. These changes should be accepted open heartedly but at the same time they should be blended with the past traditions so that the precious heritage of literature and art shouldn’t die obliviously.