The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (17 page)

…Finished “The Insomniac.” Interesting how a story that was so difficult to write, paragraph by paragraph, and proceeded rather sluggishly, nevertheless reads smoothly…as if written straight out. The structure of the story is apparent now that it is completed. An intellectual melody…counterpointed & ultimately overcome by an image.

The verbal contemplating the inexplicable: a tension felt on both sides.

Image. The fascination of the image. One’s mind, one’s imagination, is mesmerized by the image.

[…]

In terms of the image, how to approach
Son of the Morning
…?

The several visions of Nathan’s. But they are visions, not part of the narrative itself. Could organize the entire novel around a group of images. At the conclusion Nathan is married, more or less contentedly; he has become one of us. Represented by…? The mother, the daughter, the husband. Perhaps the wife is pregnant. N’s surprising happiness now that he is freed of the divine. (Still, the novel shouldn’t fail to acknowledge N’s ambivalence.)

[…]

Three significant events in my interior life in 1976. The first, Ray’s visit to Milwaukee when his mother was operated on; the second, my week or ten days of flu; the third, this week of semi-solitude while Ray is finishing his book.

After fifteen years of marriage & more or less continuous companionship, the experience of being alone is a very enlightening one. The aloneness awakens in me memories of similar times, similar emotions, many years ago. A very strong continuity of personality, then: I recognize myself as a girl seamlessly existing within my present self (a woman who will be thirty-eight on the 16th of June). It’s nonsense, as I have always believed, to imagine that one’s personality changes very much over the course of years. It expands, that’s all. Much that is unconscious becomes conscious. But I rather doubt that the external world contributes much to the quality of personality. When I was alone and definitely lonely at the age of twenty-one I wasn’t less cheerful, less concerned w/writing, less myself than I am now; an intermittently miserable fifteen (moods up & down) isn’t much different, excluding the superficial emotions, from the thirty-eight-yr-old. I always know myself, recognize myself. There’s a conversation that has been going on now for almost four decades, Alice-in-Wonderland-like.

Being alone in the house: curiously able to accomplish far more than I ordinarily do. Not just writing but physical things—polishing tables, doing laundry (another load today), vacuuming, cleaning, etc.—mundane boring totally absorbing tasks which I find myself doing with interest. (If, however, it were expected of me that I should clean the house and put new-cut roses on the tables while Ray is at the library, if he wanted me to do these
things, I would be very angry indeed—there couldn’t be a marriage, probably, under those circumstances.)[…]

July 3, 1976.
…Preparing for a two-or three-week trip, but feeling rather reluctant to leave home. Everything has been so pleasant this summer…. The house is lovely, the lawn, the river, the flowers, our leisurely schedule, the combination of magazine work and writing and trips to the University once or twice a week; not to mention our various friends. The rhythm of our ordinary life is perfect.

[…]

Finished “Expressway” and mailed it to Blanche.
*
The last writing I will do for a while. (Though I will probably take notes on the trip. For “Enchanted Island”? Or for
Son of the Morning
.) Re. “Expressway”: my fascination with driving. It’s intermittent, granted, and I can’t stay in the car for more than seven or eight hours […]; however, there’s a genuine pleasure in driving a car, even on the expressway…. Strange that I never learned to drive until I was twenty-two, given the fondness I have for it now. Not just the freedom, the ability to get around, but the actual maneuvering, the manipulation of the steering wheel, the car’s speed, etc. At best it’s a pastime, a kind of hobby. And it can get boring suddenly. But still it’s a part of my life…very easy to forget, to dismiss.

With Shuddering Fall
:
^†
imagined speed. Entirely imagined. Yet the possibility was always there. Now, high speeds don’t really interest me, in fact they don’t interest me at all. Driving at quite ordinary speeds is sufficient…. Donald Barthelme: remarking that cars frightened him. He didn’t want to drive. Fifteen years in NYC, without a car, and he’s lost the feel for driving and has come to think it’s dangerous. Which it is…no doubt.

[…]

July 22, 1976.
[…]

Returned from our trip the other day, glassy-eyed, numbed by a long day’s driving. How unreal the house and the lawn looked, and the river, so achingly beautiful…. My eyesight was troubled from the sunlight, the drive along 401 from Burlington where I’d taken over the car. There is something always disconcerting about travel, about moving long distances and coming back home, to what is familiar, yet seemingly altered. So much seems to have changed…yet it’s the same, exactly the same.

Took notes for four or five stories on the trip, and for a poem or two. “The Mime”:
*
a boy of about nineteen whom we saw in Toronto, performing late one night for a small crowd. On the steps of the Canadian Imperial Bank. Fascinating experience. One wonders who he is, what his background is, his future…. Though some of the onlookers were noisy he appeared to be completely oblivious of all distractions. He went through his routines with a superb sense of timing, gawkily-graceful, mock-innocent, really quite compelling…. Elsewhere, at noon, north of Bloor St. we heard a handsomely-dressed man of middle age playing classical guitar for an attentive crowd, in the blistering heat. Toronto is a marvelous city….

[…] Drove from Kitchener to Buffalo, stayed on Main St. in Clarence, went to the twentieth reunion of my high school class, a moving and entirely pleasurable experience, no released traumas long buried, no bad surprises, everything quite remarkable. My two best friends from high school were there, Gail Gleasner and Linnea Ogren, looking not much different than they did in 1956, both happily married, and mothers; we found that we liked one another quite as much as we ever did. At least that was my experience. Other former classmates looked changed, the men especially. Noticeably balding, growing stout. But several of the girls (women?) looked very much as they did at eighteen. These are affluent people, fairly sophisticated, so I suppose they age more gradually than others. I had felt
ambivalent about attending the reunion but it certainly turned out well. High school was fun—what more is there to say?—“fun” a necessarily trivial word. College meant so much more to me, altered my personality in ways I could not have foreseen…. Driving through Williamsville with Ray I expected to suddenly recall events from twenty years ago and to be profoundly moved, but it really didn’t happen. My affection for Gail and Linnea returned, and we promised to write one another, more faithfully than we have; it will be interesting to see whether we will, in fact.

If there’s anyone I truly miss it’s Dottie Palmer, my former roommate from Syracuse.
She
drew away from me, as she drew away from other mutual friends. Though I haven’t seen her now for years I still think of her as my close friend, perhaps my closest friend; which is nonsense, of course. Futile. I halfway think it was my marriage that did it. After Gail married, Dottie didn’t see her either. Perhaps her own life was isolated, or she felt, unreasonably, that she hadn’t as much to offer us…. The loss of a close friend is an irreparable loss, really. No one can replace the friend. Sometimes in my dream Dottie appears, and she’s never really friendly: she seems to wish I would leave her alone. Which of course I will, I have no choice about it. But I do feel the loss rather strongly at times.

[…]

So the reunion was a pleasant experience.

Next morning we took my parents for Sunday brunch at a restaurant in Snyder. Wonderful, and quite a relief, that my father is enjoying his retirement after all. He must have detested his job, a fluorescent-lit factory, year after year…could it have been forty years?…amazing. Now (he says) they go out to dinner often, take leisurely rides in the country, he’s reading, listening to music. My mother has quite a circle of friends and has really blossomed since the responsibility of Lynn was taken from her.
*
No one deserves happiness more than my parents, who worked so very hard most of their lives; thank God they’re really enjoying themselves now. All has turned out so well….

[…] Next morning drove to Georgetown, Mass., to have lunch with John Updike and his new wife/companion, Martha Bernhardt, one of the most pleasant visits we’ve ever had with anyone. Georgetown is a charming little town not far from Ipswich, where John’s and Martha’s former spouses apparently live, but their old, attractive home is situated right on the main street, and trucks pass by constantly, so that one can hardly hear what’s being said and the whole house trembles…. With all Updike’s money, and his and Martha’s good sense, how has it come about that they’ve bought a house in such a location? Updike’s working space is large and airy, though, and at the rear of the house, so perhaps the trucks won’t bother him. I’d go mad in such a small town myself but he seems to thrive upon that kind of near-seclusion. (With a family around him: Martha’s three boys. He’s like a character in an Updike story.)

The dust jacket for
Marry Me
on a bulletin board, and the sketch for a new edition of
Poorhouse Fair
.
*
Updike’s modesty: his mentioning that the new novel wasn’t particularly good, he’d rather we read his new book of poems, his assertion that he couldn’t do an anthology like the one I did for Random House because he’s “too dumb” (an outrageous statement coming from the author of
Picked-Up Pieces
alone).
*
Gentle, sly, clever, witty, charming, immensely attractive; and Martha seems to be his equal in every way. One can see why they fell in love though it isn’t possible to guess at the various agonies they experienced, and caused, in coming together. (Updike’s story “Separating” is one of the most moving stories he’s written.) We took them to lunch at a nearby restaurant and spent a wonderful two hours or so talking of innumerable things. I don’t wonder that interviewers have misread Updike, taking his assessment of himself seriously. He’s self-deprecating in a playful, understated way, the result perhaps of his early fame. Success has not spoiled him but, I suspect, made him nicer. (He said that Harvard “ruined” him—made of his natural hillbilly self another personality, an anti-self; Harvard was an anti-mater. But in
what way Updike has been ruined one can’t guess…. ) Perhaps, like me, Updike doesn’t dare acknowledge the central importance of writing to his life; perhaps the gift rather alarms him, as it does me, at times, and has the aura of something so sacred it either can’t be spoken of at all or must be alluded to in a slighting manner.

[…]

Roth and Vonnegut and Bellow were mentioned, and Erica Jong, and Alfred Kazin (“I couldn’t help but admire,” John said in his amiable way, “how Kazin’s mouth seemed to disappear under his ear”—referring to a violent spasmodic tic Kazin has developed; a tic that Ray and I found awfully distracting when we saw Kazin last, though Kazin himself isn’t the least bit self-conscious.) I liked John’s penchant for lightweight, amusing gossip, nothing malicious, nothing extreme. Yet still one could sense that he felt competitive in terms of these other writers…. I found myself unconsciously competing with him: mentioning that my writing didn’t make much money, that my books didn’t earn their advances for years. His self-deprecation couldn’t match that. A best-selling writer, after all, can’t present himself as being neglected.

Updike’s slight guilt, perhaps, over his early and easy success.
The New Yorker
means a great deal to him. In ways I can’t quite fathom. It’s a kind of parental authority, a sanctuary, a Great Good Place; there were copies lying about the house, on the dining room table, in the living room. On the walls: a Steinberg cartoon from years ago, sent to Updike at the age of thirteen; a Thurber cartoon also. (Updike was, and probably still is, a natural “fan.”) If
The New Yorker
ever disowns him the poor man will suffer horribly…but might, eventually, become a riskier and more flamboyant writer. I happen to like most of what he writes, and wouldn’t wish him to change, but that’s just selfishness on my part. We don’t want people to change whom we like.

Updike’s…modesty. He doesn’t seem to sense how odd certain remarks of his are. (He claimed that I was “famous”—but he wasn’t.) If he weren’t serious these remarks would be, in a way, unpleasant; almost aggressive. A kind of reversed snobbery. But he’s serious, he really believes these things, he’s a
hillbilly from rural Pennsylvania somehow masquerading as a world-famous writer, and the role makes him uneasy and ironic. (He repeated at once a remark I made about being “just a girl from Millersport”—and hence not, as was falsely reported, involved in a committee to argue the Nobel Prize for Bellow: I can’t imagine where Updike heard that outlandish rumor.)

We’re both Joyceans, hence cousins of a sort. But I seem to like Joyce a little better, ultimately, than Updike. (The Dublin of
Ulysses
he finds ugly.)

[…]

8
P.M.
Dinner is nearly ready. Most of today was spent going through mail, answering letters, trying to absorb vast quantities of stimuli. The impact of two batches of reviews—one from LSU (
The Fabulous Beasts
), one from Gollancz (English publication of
Poisoned Kiss
). Both quite surprisingly good. At least I was surprised re. England—I hadn’t thought the English reviewers would care for Fernandes. In fact the book seems to be doing fairly well there. Odd. Should I read these reviews, should I file them away without reading them, should I throw them away…? Against my better judgment I looked through the copy of the
New York Times Book Review
that came in the mail, knowing, since John Updike had mentioned it, that
Crossing the Border
was reviewed; I had promised myself not to seek out the review; yet I did, and was at least not disappointed. Anne Tyler, whose judgment I respect, said some nice things about the book.
*
(And Evelyn said over the phone today that
Newsweek
praised it quite highly. How strange, how perplexing, that a book I don’t think very much of should be praised at all, by anyone…. I don’t dislike it, I think it has charm in part, and some power, and the amusing stories are, well, amusing; but after all it isn’t
The Assassins
, which my life’s-blood (or very nearly) flowed into. And which wasn’t well-received at all.) One simply can’t anticipate a book’s response.