The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (24 page)

If the powerless
must
claim power, it’s naturally an invisible & incalculable power.

Energy, talent, vision, insight, compassion, the ability to stay with a single work for long periods of time, the ability to be
faithful
(to both one’s writing and one’s beloved)—these have nothing to do with gender.

The opportunism of contemporary “scholars”—attempting to construct a “women’s literature.” Is it simply because they wish to be published, because they wish to be promoted? Do they believe the far-fetched ideas they advance?…The sensibility of a Virginia Woolf, for instance. It’s her own, it’s uniquely hers. Not because she is a “female” but because she is, or was, Virginia Woolf. Not more sensitive than Henry James or Proust or James Joyce, consequently not more “feminine” in the narrow & misleading sense people use that term today…. But then I suppose critics must have something to write about. The profession demands it.

[…]

January 26, 1977.
…Last night saw the film version of “In the Region of Ice” & was very moved by it.
*
The actors were superb, the photography arresting, even the background music in good taste. Black & white: and so it seemed of the 50’s, remote & sad. I would have preferred the Richard character to have seemed more manic, more dangerous. Not Richard: Allen. Sister Irene was beautifully played…. Beforehand, however, I was extremely embarrassed. Since the film was shown in the Ontario Film series, after a Canadian film (which we didn’t see), the audience was largely university people…but there was no other way for me to arrange to see the movie, and I was committed to seeing it since Andre Guttfreund went to so much trouble to send it. As things turned out it was fine: the experience wasn’t mortifying: Ray and I were both quite moved by what Peter Werner and his actors achieved.

Memories of that phase of my life. At the University of Detroit, a young teacher in her twenties, possibly more adventurous than I am now (or would wish to be); confronted with a brilliant student who gradually, or was it rather quickly, slipped into madness…. What was so alarming
about the experience was my own naivete. I kept reading Richard W. as a lively, provocative, intriguingly combative (and obnoxious) student of the sort I should have welcomed in class since he provided a challenge to my authority rather than a demented person who would soon become dangerous. A memory of Richard in my office, sitting at my desk. I returned from class to find him looking through my papers & he turned w/his manic gleeful laugh and said something vaguely intimidating…. But my social instinct was (as it still is, I suppose) to turn such uneasy confrontations into jokes; to exchange nervous pleasantries with the mad. (And then too I was reluctant to believe him “mad.” The very concept struck me as outdated, silly, conservative…and weren’t we studying Dostoyevsky and Sartre and Camus and Céline and Nietzsche in my course? Richard could talk about literature brilliantly if not always coherently and it wasn’t until some months passed that his overwrought appearance and manner and laughter began to frighten me.) So I wrote “In the Region of Ice,” thinking half-seriously of allowing him to read it. I must have thought it would have functioned as a sort of warning to him: look, you’re in danger of committing suicide if you continue as you are! It had been accepted by the
Atlantic Monthly
when Richard killed Rabbi Adler in full view of his synagogue in Southfield, and then killed himself. I couldn’t have guessed at the extent of his violence, his rage & bewilderment.

…Richard was fond of me but not fond enough of me to want to kill me. Ahead of me on his list, along with Rabbi Adler, was a history professor—or sociology—named Charlotte Zimmerman, his advisor. Who has since left U.D., has disappeared from my acquaintance…. Richard was charming at times, at other times absolutely unbearable. I certainly liked him. He never came to me as he did to Sister Irene, but had he made an appeal what might I have done?—how could I have responded? After his death his other professors wondered aloud how they might have “saved” him. They spoke of feeling “guilty.” I never did: I hadn’t that much power over him. To save another person from such a fate, to dissuade him from the scenario he has stubbornly created—what a miracle that would be! I hadn’t even the egotism appropriate to youth, or to a fairly attractive young woman only a year or two older than her aggressive and doomed admirer. Now he’s been dead more than ten years. What was the point of his act of
murder & his theatrical suicide? Death is merely dead, mute deadness. I hate even the thought of R’s deadness.

January 27, 1977.
…Another bitterly cold day. But sunny; rather lovely. Have been working on Claude Frey’s novel, possibly to be called
Jigsaw
. Notes & tentative scenes in longhand. The novel is growing rather shapelessly about Claude’s personality, which has become more wistful than I had anticipated…. The frustrated yearning of middle age for its own childhood & innocence. More than that: the longing for beauty, the longing to preserve beauty. But as one tries desperately to preserve it, one destroys it.

Lonely still for
Son of the Morning
. For my immersion in Nathan’s consciousness, his intense relationship with God. How passionately I miss the writing of that novel…in the early morning, especially; and in the evening (at the moment it’s 9:30
P.M.
, a Thursday). Short stories don’t seem to absorb me as they once did. There’s such a paucity of consciousness in a story, I mean such a paucity of my own involvement in it; one no sooner creates a living, breathing (sic) human being than one has finished with him. The divine form is the novel, which includes the entire world…which can bring about an alteration of consciousness in the author if all goes as it should….

[…]

The terrible challenge of James Joyce. After
Ulysses
and
Finnegans Wake
, what remains? Experimentation for its own sake seems sterile & pointless. Especially since one cannot hope or wish to out Joyce Joyce. What Joyce doesn’t do is enormous, of course, yet one’s attention is drawn to what he has done…and made impossible for others to do.

[…]

Will be teaching
Brave New World
tomorrow in my large class; must talk about satire briefly. Then off to the Michigan Inn for luncheon with my friends, if the weather isn’t too formidable…. Am haunted by a sense of laziness or unworthiness. Obscure sense of inadequacy. A story of mine in the current
Viva
with a fairly handsome illustration but I couldn’t force
myself to buy the magazine, it’s so vulgar, so…so vulgar.
*
What am I doing in it, what is my name doing on its cover…! And last month in
Playboy
. I don’t know how these things happen & feel too numb to contemplate them, as if my fate were out of my hands: simultaneously shameful and utterly insignificant…. My life too is a jigsaw puzzle, an odd baroque game.

[…]

January 29, 1977.
[…] The sense of the divine, the sacred. A genuine stirring some years ago: 1971. And for years afterward. Then a kind of waning, a gradual loss…the loss as ineffable as the reality. How to explain this, how to find the proper language…. Impossible. Nathan’s loss was much greater than my own because the Divine, in him, was much more powerful. I am by no means bereft & broken as he was…nor would I wish to be as God-intoxicated as he was in his prime. “The motions of grace, the hardness of heart, external circumstances.” Grace, surely: the correct word: fortuitous & utterly unpredictable. Beyond human control. The Divine can swallow one up, can buoy one aloft, and then recede: simply disappear.

[…]

February 6, 1977.
[…] To what extent, I wonder, are all individuals the spectators of their own lives. Does everyone glance back over his shoulder to reassess the person he’s been, does everyone have moments (as I do) when he feels quite blissfully detached from the actor who is acting out his lines as if they were terribly serious…. Personality: persona. Mask. The real self is elsewhere. Deeper. Inaccessible to consciousness. To have faith in God means, possibly, to have faith in this deeper & wiser & in a way impersonal, unknown self. To have faith in faith. To love. To be loyal to. To continue to search for. To continue the search.

Someone said, my friend John Gardner in fact, that at certain moments we know that all we have is each other…that we’re here together & must
make a world of it. But I don’t agree. I think he’s wrong. His psychology is shallow, his sense of mystery is programmatic & contrived. He writes as if he were a critic writing—actively writing. “Like this. I’ll show you,” says the music teacher, taking his student’s place at the piano. And plays for his student’s edification. So John “plays” at his writing—spinning out plots to illustrate his essentially didactic imagination. Yet he doesn’t quite believe in what he’s doing. So he has said, and so his behavior seems to suggest. His worry is that he’s a slick showman & a kind of confidence-man & that he will actually fool people into thinking he’s the real thing…& that, consequently, he will never grow into the “real thing.” (But he could, he certainly could. If only he would set aside his plodding moralism, moralizing, his over-academic notion of what a novel should be in order to make it a candidate for New Critical attention.)…No word from John since he and Joan have separated. Awkward, to continue a relationship when it’s always been with a couple, not an individual; and now the couple is extinct. Rumors abound that John is living in a small town in New York State, not far from Bennington, with a former Bennington student who is twenty years younger than he. The sort of thing he always contemptuously opposed in others: men leaving their wives & children for younger women. Berating me, in fact, for not having given his children (he was drunk at the time) good, healthy models of family life in my writing. As if one wrote for children…who are not apt to be fooled by propaganda anyway. A generous man, intelligent & talented & inventive, yet capable of unsettling gestures of cruelty. So hopelessly drunk at our last meeting that he couldn’t rise from the table with the rest of us…. Does he like me, or dislike me. I suppose his feelings are ambivalent. But then he doesn’t know me, really.

[…]

February 12, 1977.
[…] Flaubert’s remark that the content of a novel is nothing, perhaps might be nothing; style everything. In the writing of a novel this is certainly true. Finding the voice, the point of view, the quirky lens-angle that is the angle—that is everything. Only afterward does it seem that the characters might possibly spring to life quite apart from the language: might be taken over, let’s say, by someone else & pursued further. It sounds like occultism…but is it only common sense? Or is it (like much that is “common” sense) simply bunk. A novel is a skein of
words. It is words. Or is it? It appears to be words, then. As a photograph in a newspaper, seen close up, appears to be made of dots. Or a painting is a series of brushstrokes. But the “reality” isn’t in the minute but in the organization, in the glimmering background, backdrop, whatever…the world evoked by the words. Thus the novelist could lose his or her novel characters, “invented” characters, to someone else…mistaking the minute (the words) for the governing cohesive reality.

[…]

…Contemporary tragedy. The small writ large; the large writ small. The impossibility of connection between the individual & his—or any—community. A critic named Pickering chided me for having written stories about rootless unconnected suburban people;
*
but what is one to do, given the condition of our era? Nostalgia doesn’t appeal to me. Looking back over my shoulder with a tear in my eye doesn’t appeal to me. Writers are blamed for writing of what exists, as if they had caused certain dislocations of the time…. The banality of most of the criticism that has attached itself to my work. Hastily-written, incoherent, uncomprehending. What value? Very little. It isn’t infrequent that reviewers get the plots wrong. Am I naïve to have expected more consideration, am I naïve to be disappointed…? Even “positive” criticism so often seems uninformed, ignorant. What to do? Keep on writing, I suppose; try to write better than in the past; remain stoic. At the very least it can be said that I’ve made a great deal of money—enough to be financially independent for life—if that’s any consolation.

[…]

February 20, 1977.
…Finished the essay on Lawrence: Lawrence’s Götterdämmerung.
^†
Very satisfying, very enjoyable indeed; especially this morning’s work, rereading and revising and doing footnotes. There is nothing quite like analyzing and speculating in this way…dealing with a great work of art, bringing various threads together, developing ideas that arise over a period of time…in this case, over a period of about ten
years. Whatever the essay’s ultimate fate it has certainly been a pleasure to write.

I feel the urge, now, to write more essays…to write a book-length study, even, of someone whose work I admire…. The strange, surprising, undeniable satisfaction of critical writing: “critical” a poor term for it, really.

The work of art, for all its gorgeous beauty and perfection, or near-perfection, even for all its marvelous voice, its music, is curiously mute: shy and coy and unspoken-of: until another person comes along to snatch it up in his or her arms and bear it aloft, crying out for all to hear
This is a masterpiece! I will tell you why; and in so doing I will, of course, put forth certain ideas of my own
….

Literature as a dialogue, never-ceasing. In order to say anything about another person I must do more than simply present him, more even than simply interpret him; I must put forth my own view; and in so doing I create a kind of sub-literature or para-literature that complements the original work. Viewing literature as a critic I can see that my own work is there, in a sense, to be commented on. The writer wants his work to be experienced, and possibly (though not always) to be praised; he doesn’t really want it to be the occasion for other people to exercise their genius…feeling, quite justifiably, that the critic is in a subtle contest with him and can’t help winning; can’t help feeling the satisfaction, however unreasonable, of “winning.” But as I am a critic at least part of the time, and thrill to the not-inconsiderable pleasures of criticism, I will have to be more tolerant of others’ comments on my writing. I will have to see critics as friendly rivals, as people very much like myself, drawn to certain works possibly because they wish to quarrel with them; but drawn irresistibly, which is all that a writer can ask.