A Garden of Earthly Delights (61 page)

In this new edition, which is slightly longer than the original, the principal characters, Carleton, Clara, and Swan, are more directly presented. My intention is not to narrate their stories so much as to allow the reader to experience them intimately, from the inside. Though there are no first-person passages or experimental sleights of hand, of a kind I would employ in
Expensive People
and
them
, the Walpoles speak more frequently; we are more frequently in their heads; lengthy expository passages have been condensed, or eliminated. Very little in the plot has been altered, and no new characters are introduced or old characters dropped. Clara and Swan move in their original zigzag courses to their inevitable and unalterable fates; Carleton moves more swiftly to his, a self-determined fate that more befits the man's character. In the new
A Garden of Earthly Delights
Carleton is acknowledged as more heroic than I had seen him originally, when I was so young. Clara is more sympathetic, and Swan more subtle and capricious in his spiritual malaise. (Swan and I share a predilection for insomnia, but not much else.) I knew little of nursing homes in 1965–66, and now in 2002 I know all too much about them, since my elderly, ailing parents' experiences over the past several years, which makes the conclusion of
A Garden of Earthly Delights
particularly poignant to me. How chilling, a young writer's prophecies seem in retrospect! If we write enough, and live long enough, our lives will be largely déjí vu, and we ourselves the ghost-characters we believed we had created.

The effort of the rewriting was not to alter
A Garden of Earthly Delights
but to present its original characters more clearly, unoccluded by an eager young writer's prose. They seem to me now like figures in a “restored” film or figures seen through a lens that required polishing and sharper focusing. What remains unchanged is
the chronicle of the Walpoles, my initial attempt at an “American epic.” The trajectory of social ambition and social tragedy dramatized by the Walpoles seems to me as relevant to the twenty-first century as it had seemed in the late 1960s, not dated but bitterly enhanced by our current widening disparity between social classes in America.
Haves and have-nots
is too crude a formula to describe this great subject, for as Swan Walpole discovers, to
have
, and not to
be
, is to have lost one's soul.

P
RINCETON
, A
UGUST
2002

Maya Angelou

•

Daniel J. Boorstin

•

A. S. Byatt

•

Caleb Carr

•

Christopher Cerf

•

Ron Chernow

•

Shelby Foote

•

Charles Frazier

•

Vartan Gregorian

•

Richard Howard

•

Charles Johnson

•

Jon Krakauer

•

Edmund Morris

•

Joyce Carol Oates

•

Elaine Pagels

•

John Richardson

•

Salman Rushdie

•

Oliver Sacks

•

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

•

Carolyn See

•

William Styron

•

Gore Vidal

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

The principal text of this Modern Library edition was set in a digitized version of Janson, a typeface that dates from about 1690 and was cut by Nicholas Kis, a Hungarian working in Amsterdam. The original matrices have survived and are held by the Stempel foundry in Germany. Hermann Zapf redesigned some of the weights and sizes for Stempel, basing his revisions on the original design.

Copyright © 1966, 1967 by Joyce Carol Oates Copyright © 2003 by Ontario Review, Inc.

Biographical note copyright © 2000 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

This work was originally published, in substantially different form, in 1967 by Vanguard Books.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Oates, Joyce Carol, 1938–

A garden of earthly delights / Joyce Carol Oates.—Modern Library pbk. ed. p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-52575-8

1. Children of migrant laborers—Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters— Fiction. 3. Illegitimate children—Fiction. 4. Mothers and sons— Fiction. 5. Poor women—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3565. A8 G3 2003

813'.54—dc21

2002038012

Modern Library website address:
www.modernlibrary.com

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