The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (20 page)

Memories of Syracuse, my first year. Homesick. Waking so very early—the alarm going off at 6:45—everything dark & freezing. The cafeteria a block away in a dormitory. Plodding through the snow, groggy from lack of sleep, always rather insecure re. schoolwork despite my grades. French class at 8
A.M
. Hall of Languages, aged & musty & forlorn. My sense of the
importance
of every class, every hour, every day. A kind of sanctity that high school didn’t have. Ritual. Ceremony. Reading & rereading texts. Extra assignments. Books on reserve. A curious insatiable love of learning…. Working part-time at the library until I had a kind of breakdown, December of my sophomore year. Romance there too: the old, antiquated library, the smell of the books, the loneliness back in the stacks, the absurdly ill-paid, tiring work. The heart condition put an end to part-time work and, for a while, to my sense of myself as an athletic young woman. I’ve never fully regained it. What have I lost?

September 2, 1976.
[…] Have begun to think of the academic year imminent. A certain reluctance, as usual; summer was so idyllic. But already the weather seems to have changed. At once. September 1 and it was cool, windy, autumnal. Today is the same. I sit here staring at a blue, blue sky, and wonder where the summer went, shivering, regretting I didn’t do more yet
what
more could I have done…. The constant moving-on, onward, perpetual motion, a sense at times that the days pass slowly, agreeably slowly, a sense at other times that the film is speeded up and something must be amiss. To be thirty-eight years old seems no different, really, from being eighteen or twenty-eight, and, I suspect, forty-eight. A kind of flickering of self, soul, that remains constant. Which is not to say, of course, that the emotions surrounding the self are constant; they are not.

[…]

Thinking idly of
Son of the Morning
. Thinking, brooding, dreaming about Nathan. Haunted by. Fascinated. A little worried.

[…]

September 14, 1976.
…Lovely day. Wrote eighteen pages of
Son of the Morning
, the first chapter, am fairly satisfied though of course I’ll rewrite much of it. Got up early yesterday and before leaving for school (the first day of classes) wrote the first page, Nathan’s elegiac voice, am pleased with it, it’s the voice of the novel I have been waiting for all these months…. Revision of Ashton Vickery’s chapter should be a pleasure: it’s Ashton rendered by way of Nathan, many years later. An odd novel, not “my” voice at all.

Wrote from 9:30 until 2:45, my first break, had breakfast then and afterward began preparing Laing—
Sanity, Madness and the Family
—and Lawrence’s poetry. In between read more of the Bible; am becoming quite mesmerized. Lovely lonely voices like that of Romans. And Isaiah, in part. Finished St. Augustine whom I realize now I truly don’t like; don’t plan to reread. That business with his mother is simply too much—the ridiculous prig! Worrying that he’d been too emotional, having shed a tear or two for the dead woman. What idiocy. And what an obscene influence “Saint” Augustine must have had upon otherwise normal people. To consistently
downgrade the human, to attribute every grace and talent and inclination toward goodness only to God…. A sickly attitude, indeed. If Augustine’s mother is a good woman he’s quick to say that of course she wasn’t good in herself but only by way of God, God’s blessing. So everything is offered up to the transcendental and inhuman God, and all that remains human is sinful, “material.” I hate such perverts. I can see why Nietzsche became so unreasonable on the subject.

Though we may be living in the decline of the West, in the last days of the American Empire, I can’t truthfully say that any other era was superior. Not at all. This is the most open, the most adventurous, the most exciting epoch; and the sanest as well, no matter what critics of our culture say. They’re romantics, they’re deluded. To have lived at any other time in history, particularly as a woman—the thought is atrocious.

[…]

September 16, 1976.
…Woke at six and couldn’t get back to sleep. Dentist’s appointment at nine. Made another appointment to have two wisdom teeth extracted in October; should be an interesting experience. (Do I get a general anesthetic?—what a horror.) A chilly gray featureless wet day, prematurely November.

Worked on
Son of the Morning
. Revised first chapter. Am thinking about the next chapter, Elsa’s “annunciation.” The voice of Nathanael is, anyway, a Godsend. The very rhythms and cadences needed to carry the lurid tale through….

Read in the Bible. Gospels again. Very exciting & chilling. Who knows Christ?—very few people, I’m sure. Very few “religious” people.

[…]

Began teaching in the summer of 1962. Which makes me rather a veteran now. Nothing is more effortless, more enjoyable. An odd sparkling unpredictable synthesis of the intellectual appetite & the social. One is buoyed along by the students’ presences…by their response to the literature & to the questions I ask or the problems I pose. The only really unpleasant
stretch of teaching I had was back at the University of Detroit that final semester, when I was assigned (deliberately, I suppose) classes on five days a week, and the schedule grew tiresome and tiring and I really couldn’t wait for it all to end. Yet there are fond memories of certain students at U.D. Some truly gifted young people.

A pity, how we melt into one another as time passes. A pity too that the delights of the classroom are always lost, substanceless as smoke; unrecordable. There is no way to communicate to another person the sense of success and even of triumph that a “good” class brings, without sounding vain or foolish. And the days, the weeks, the months, the years are like vapor. Nothing is retained. So teaching is, in a way, the antithesis of art, which is permanent—or, at any rate, as permanent as one might wish. The one falls away, the other remains. Yet both seem, to me, necessary: I would not want one without the other.

September 18, 1976.
[…] Looking through the hundred or so prints John C. gave me,
*
I came to the conclusion that I am awfully thin…though when I look at myself in the mirror it doesn’t seem so; I seem merely normal. How odd it is, to be staring at oneself, photo after photo, scanning them rapidly, looking for something halfway decent—not that, even, but something recognizable. Is this face my face, this body my body, why is it or was it inevitable, must I care about it, must I care for it? I don’t seem to identify much with my appearance. It’s an image, a droll eccentric thing. Some of the snapshots seem unusually good, some unusually bad; none are convincing. The introvert turns away from the extrovert’s highly-charged social world simply because its surfaces bore him, and because he senses that its surfaces are misleading. Aren’t we all here behind our facial masks, somewhere inside our brains, waiting to be discovered…?

[…]

September 22, 1976.
[…]…There are times, like now, when I feel as if I might drown in the mystery, the riddle, of existence. That I am not
capable of grasping anything, not even the “point” of my own life. I know only that I have certain strong emotional attachments to certain people and that I must honor them, must continue to love them, value them—what else is there? My writing, which is so important to me, isn’t somehow myself. It seems to be something I do, something that is done; and then pushed aside, with care no doubt, yet irrevocably pushed aside, so that something else may arise. And that in its turn is dealt with, imagined, completed. So a work of art proceeds out of a kind of mystic, nebulous world of shadows that is as much impersonal as personal, and is filtered through consciousness, transformed into something communal. It takes its place, hopefully, in a certain cultural context; but is it in any meaningful way one’s own self…? Are human relationships the only reality?

The yoga that is the “way of love” would be, then, the highest pathway to Enlightenment.

The personalities and disparate destinies of my students and friends seem overwhelming to me at the present time. It’s the acceleration of the early weeks of autumn…. I seem to feel, not merely to know, that we are all deeply and profoundly related, even in a way the same person…close as identical twins, more intimate than mere lovers. Hopefully this conviction will pass…it leaves me almost breathless, speechless, with awe. There is no need even for love in such a world, since we are all joined by love anyway…since, somehow, we are love.

[…]

September 28, 1976.
…Worked yesterday and Sunday on the novel; finished the third chapter; am going slowly and gropingly, feeling my way along. The nobility of Stoic atheism…the intense, overwrought, passionate
certainty
of Christianity; an inevitable struggle with an inevitable outcome.

Truth, says William James, is what works…. Truth is that which releases energy. No sane person can accept this, no more than (I suspect) James himself accepted it; nevertheless “truth” is that which survives and
in order to survive it must triumph against its enemies…must defeat them. So the passionate irrationality of the Christian faith sweeps away all dissenters.

Sherry Beckhl, of Toronto, is coming this afternoon at one to interview me for
Weekend Magazine
. She sounds quite intelligent and sensitive, and
Weekend
is, surprisingly, a quite good magazine of its type.

[…]

October 5, 1976.
…Spent most of the morning doing proof for
The Triumph of the Spider Monkey: The First-Person Confession of the Maniac Bobbie Gotteson As Told to Joyce Carol Oates
. Eyes watering with laughter, pain, embarrassment, surprise…it occurred to me midway into the novel that it was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever read, and yet I wrote it myself; I wrote it. Thank God it will have a quiet publication at Black Sparrow. Perhaps no one will take notice….

[…]

October 9, 1976.
[…] Talked on the phone yesterday with James Tuttleton of NYU: so I will be teaching summer school there, a graduate seminar in “creative writing,” June 13 to July 22, Tuesdays & Thursdays from 10–12; a handsome salary and an apartment in the bargain—the apartment on Washington Square being, really, the only reason I accepted the offer. (Money means nothing, or has a negative meaning—what with my tax situation; but a marvelous apartment in Greenwich Village, a short walk from NYU’s beautiful new library—! It’s so generous of the Administration there, I am truly pleased & delighted & grateful.)

[…]

October 20, 1976.
…Finished Part I of
Son of the Morning
; have arrived at a sort of resting-place; am wondering whether to proceed in a more or less naturalistic fashion, or move into the frankly surreal…. Angels, clouds, demonic presences, overwhelming signs & wonders: how odd they seem, how curious and pathological, when we are in one phase of personality (as I appear to be in now). It’s difficult to remember, to
believe
, in the power of the psyche, once one swings into the extroverted phase.

For the past two or three years I seem to be in this phase: extroverted. The amount of time I spend with others, talking, chattering, gossiping, frankly & shamelessly wasting time…. A journal can’t begin to show such moments; all that’s recorded are moments of introspection, of re-thinking and re-imagining. Yet apart from the deep intensity of the novel (which is all I’ve been writing now for months, I believe) some of my most absorbing times are those spent in conversation. […] For approximately a week after the wisdom teeth extraction I was unusually tired, and thought obsessively of sleep; but not really of dreams and dreaming. Perhaps if I had simply allowed myself to get a little more than the usual 5–7 hrs. sleep I would have felt better: but my puritan sense of morality forbids such luxury. The numinous power of the psyche obviously comes and goes, like grace. It cannot be coerced.

[…]

October 25, 1976.
[…] Heard again from A.K. today. Odd, that he pursues me. He imagines that a story not yet published (it will appear in
Playboy
)
*
is about him and threatens to take the issue “to the courts”—whatever that means; he hasn’t even read the story, which in any case isn’t about him. So strange, so strange.

I suppose his behavior is explicable: he seeks to find, in my fiction, his own image; a justification for his own existence. And that’s absurd since he
needs
no justification for his life. Why doesn’t he merely live it, and forget about me? Instead he appears to be obsessed. His latest letter, written just last week, is tremulous with all the old emotions of six years ago. It’s all so perplexing, so dismaying…. He hopes to find by scanning my fiction traces of himself, and by doing so (or by imagining he has done so) he experiences a sort of emotional charge. Unfortunately I haven’t written about him at all. I’ve written about people who were homosexuals, but not about him. In our relationship his homosexuality wasn’t an issue; it was his attempt to coerce me into praising his book in print, and my refusal to do so. A strange, sad, warped man who wishes ill for so many others…. “Love. Friendship” was based on the hurt I felt at his treat
ment of Ray and me, being otherwise completely fictional.
*
(Though I wonder why A.K. doesn’t read himself into that story.) I wonder where it will all end?

[…]

November 20, 1976.
…Worked on
Son of the Morning
; went out to the library; spent an hour or two looking through magazines like
Ms.
and
Psychology Today
and even the dreary
Saturday Review
…not altogether a waste of time, since I came away fascinated by the emphasis placed now on the
self
, not the “self” in terms of personality so much as in terms of the body. Narcissism: giving people instructions in self-love, as if they really need it rather than instructions in the love of others. So the political concern of the 60’s withers back to a moronic concern for one’s own physical pleasure. What does it matter if the world is disintegrating, if people are starving to death, so long as industrious young women with subscriptions to
Ms.
learn how to induce physical spasms in their bodies…and declare their gleeful independence of men.