The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (27 page)

Regarding the visions of saints and mystics: they do experience revelations. But there is no basis for believing that these revelations apply to anyone beyond themselves. Sparks igniting in the optical nerve—not in the universe. One might
almost
envy such myopia.

Some years ago I too had a “vision” of sorts. And the truths subsequently unfolded in my mind are truths I value very much. I don’t doubt them, I remember them always, they are intimate as my pulsebeat. But did they come to me from “God”…or from my own buried self…? (Or are the two one, as Jung might have speculated?) It does not matter, whatever the source of the revelation it was powerful enough to change my personality and to some extent the course of my life, and my writing. Its effect has not yet been totally felt. Years must pass before I can assimilate it into my writing without strain…. The certainty (aha: certainty!) that our phenomenal lives are somehow different, even estranged from our “essential” lives or the lives of our souls; the certainty that we are all linked, and are in fact one substance or one vast soul; the certainty that everything that is, is right—if for no other reason than because it could not have been different, from the very start of what we call time. I suppose this sounds like mysticism. I wouldn’t make any great claims for it. Death lifts from us like a veil; the fear of death lifts; the personality itself lifts and fades. All very marvelous. It’s true—I think. But I find at this point in my life that I really value the finite, the particular, the personal, the quirky, the secular. I don’t want “eternity”—I want time. Whatever is, is. I don’t care if it’s right or wrong or vulgar or pointless or even healthy. I want it simply because it is; and because it won’t last.

[…]

May 4, 1977.
…Returned home from a week’s vacation. Johns Hopkins and Washington, D.C., primarily. The reading at Johns Hopkins went strangely, though well enough, I suppose: John Barth’s introduction was witty and lighthearted though ultimately respectful (Oates as a kind of nineteenth-century writer wishing to appropriate the world), the students seemed receptive and interested and quick to laugh after their usual bewilderment at the prospect of a woman who is deliberately amusing…. […] I read poems and concluded with “Lamb of Abyssalia,” which the audience seemed to follow well enough, though I doubt the wisdom of reading that particular story aloud…. Afterward, much relief. As Samuel Johnson said of
Paradise Lost
: One would not wish it longer.

Baltimore a surprisingly lovely and congenial city…! The Barths, John and Shelley, live in an area called Guilford, not far from the University.
Their home is an enormous stucco building, three floors, with a conservatory and what appeared to be a small ballroom (or was it a second dining room); very nicely furnished, comfortable and gracious […]. Jack Barth is a kindly, funny, erudite man, slim, attractive, conservatively well-dressed, far more hospitable than I had imagined […].

In Baltimore, visited with Anne Tyler and her charming psychiatrist-professor husband Tighe (an Iranian whose last name I don’t know: must find out). Tighe made us a delicious Persian shishkebab. The four of us seemed to have a great deal to say to one another…we talked and talked about literature, teaching, Freud, life in general…went for a walk through Homeland…made tentative plans to get together again this summer. I find that I like Anne Tyler immensely; and her husband as well. (Ray likes them both very much too.) Anne is a person of wit and intelligence, very attractive though unostentatious, slender and girlish (she is a year younger than I), the mother of two girls (eleven and eight)…a fine writer. It was very kind of her to invite us to lunch; I had envisioned our taking them out.

[…]

Drove from Pittsburgh home in the rain. Feel tired, giddy, restless. Plans for two stories, one of them probably novella length: a young man of nineteen named Duncan, son of a (dead?) clergyman-scholar, pre-med student who drops out of college temporarily, overworked, prim & shy & nervous, falls in love with his cousin Antoinette, fourteen years old, girlish, rather childish…outspoken, bold, adventurous…. Set on Skye Island, Maine.
*
Duncan imagines himself cerebral and aloof, in control of his emotions; the tragedy of the relationship is that he isn’t in control and that his miscalculation of himself leads to his cousin’s death…. Ideally the story should be trim, tight, severe, “classical.” It would be a challenge to try for a tragic feeling, a tragic tone. Structure: as pared-back as possible. Very few characters, very few scenes.

[…]

…Read Cheever’s
Falconer
today.
^†
Rather disappointing: the flat stereotyped characters (Farragut’s wife, his fellow prisoners), the improbable
episodes (not brought into intelligent or witty focus as they are in his more deftly surreal stories), the blatantly “positive”—and unconvincing—ending. Well. Called an “American masterpiece” by my friend Walter Clemons at
Newsweek
.
Is
it? And am I simply blind to its merits? […] But there are some lovely passages scattered throughout, having to do with abstract ideas or with Farragut’s memories. Some of Cheever’s sentences are certainly beautiful, graceful, uncanny. The problem might be that he is by nature a short story writer and cannot sustain a long work. In a story like “The Swimmer” the single surreal image is wonderfully developed, but in
Falconer
there are too many images that compete awkwardly with one another and come to no resolution. (The prison cats, for instance, are barely mentioned before their slaughter; and then never mentioned again. Why? I suspect Cheever has no idea.) The “resurrection” of Farragut is a crude device, almost corny; embarrassing. It must have some private, powerful meaning to Cheever who himself came close to death and was “resurrected”…but he hasn’t transformed the process into a meaningful work of art here.

Reading Mishima’s
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
.
*
Mishima is more of an artist than Cheever, and more of a thinker. Yet though he concerns himself quite consciously with “beauty” there isn’t much that is beautiful or compelling or moving about the novel. One can admire it without being able to like it. There’s no doubt, however, that Mishima was a genius of some sort. Terrifying, really. He had written fifty books by the age of thirty-two…and went on to write more before his suicide a decade or so later…. Yes, an extraordinary talent, an extraordinary voice, eerily “rational” even as his character (Mizoguchi) descends into madness.

[…]

May 12, 1977.
…Working, strangely, on a manuscript of stories that will probably be called
Sunday Blues
.
^†
Rewriting pages, passages, scenes…“interfacing”…interlocking themes, images, events…people. This volume won’t be published for many, many years and so it’s
perhaps a little quixotic to be working on it this morning; but my imagination seems to have swerved in that direction. (A nice discovery that several of the stories already interlock. And others can be very gracefully brought together.)

The unsatisfactory nature of an “anthology” of stories without a unifying structure and theme. No more than a jumble, a random collection.
By the North Gate
was not so consciously interfaced as subsequent volumes of stories but it was unified by theme at least…. Could I go back, however, and revise, could I have the freedom of altering the past, what might I accomplish in a morning’s time in regard to those early books…!

[…]

Amazing and not altogether pleasant news: Blanche sold “The Mime” to
Penthouse
, of all places. But I won’t have to read it in that context. If I needed the money ($1500) I would be pleased and grateful, but I don’t need the money, or the notoriety, which makes me wonder why I don’t ask Blanche not to send my stories to such markets…. Am I simply too shy, or…. Do I feel guilty about the fact that sales to the magazines I value most highly (like
Hudson Review
,
Chicago Review
,
Southern R
.) bring Blanche almost no money at all…. An agent must be given freedom to act, I think; otherwise one shouldn’t have an agent at all. (Though I did ask Blanche never to send Gordon Lish any more of my work and she seems to have agreed that
Esquire
was a poor market.)

…Very fine letter from Evelyn re.
Son of the Morning
.
*
And beautiful dust-jacket designs by Betsy Woll for
Night-Side
. I prefer Betsy’s design to the Magritte painting I had originally suggested for a cover. A pity
Childwold
hadn’t had a better, more appropriate design…it was probably the least attractive, the most frankly ugly, of all my dust jackets.

…Reading short stories, finished
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
finally (strange reptilian consciousness, fascinating), planning Duncan and Antoinette’s tragic story…which must be kept trim, neat, spare…. Long
lazy pleasant days. Idyllic in fact. The house and lawn have never been more attractive. Tulips and wisteria in the courtyard; bumblebees; fragrance of new-mown grass. Our only problem is a small ragged glassy-eyed army of tomcats that prowl the grounds day and night, especially night. While our cats remain indifferent, sleeping most of the time. Is “love” and its hypnosis a matter of such transpersonal impersonal functionings or…but…Well. Best not to inquire.

[…]

May 13, 1977.
…Infinitely lazy days. I must struggle against a profound feeling of worthlessness. Or do I mean a feeling of profound worthlessness….

[…]

The narcissism of journal-keeping. Is it a legitimate accusation…? Keeping a journal isn’t always pleasurable. What, then, stimulates the diarist to keep with it? A sense of order, perhaps. Curiosity. Years from now I can look back to May 13, 1977, to see what I was doing, or rather what I didn’t do. And see myself at the age of thirty-eight years and eleven months gazing sightlessly into the future, toward an unfathomable future self. Mirrors reflecting mirrors. As a record of a writer’s life this journal might be misleading because when I am writing most furiously I haven’t time for the journal, except as an afterthought. (But my sense of obligation to the journal keeps me close to it, even when I’d rather skip an entry.)

All human beings are narcissists, and the journal-keeper is consequently not exempt from the charge. But the journal-keeper, unlike other people, confronts his or her narcissism daily. And—it’s to be hoped—conquers it by way of laughing at it…. Aren’t we all, we enormously vain human beings, richly amusing?

Reading of Swedenborg’s doctrine of the soul. Wherein the entire physical machinery of the body and its sensory organs are assigned to the soul and receive spiritual significance. Possibly true? Impossibly? But a rich metaphoric notion nonetheless.

Rewriting pages in
Jigsaw
. Feel lonely, still, for the activity of novel-writing. Miss Nathanael Vickery too. What if I never write another novel that
stirs me so profoundly as
Son of the Morning
…? Stirred, I should say. A kind of desert then, in which things do grow but not floridly: minimally, courteously. I can always write courteous prose. But to be wild, to be reckless, lurid…. That isn’t always accessible.

Working with old notes for the story about déjà vu. Dare I call the story Déjà Vu…?
*
I must have been in an odd deprived state of mind when I took those notes, some months ago. Very strange…. My equilibrium is such that I suppose I could never swerve into any really unusual state of consciousness for very long. I’m the most sane person I know—with the possible exception of Kay Smith […]. It’s strange but perhaps not remarkable that I should have such an interest and such an abiding sympathy for the mentally deranged…for the emotionally bewildered. If I were a bit unhinged myself I suppose I would write orderly, classical tales, in terror of venturing away from the domestic wherein the chaos of the universe is reduced to navigable size.

Saw Woody Allen’s
Annie Hall
last night and enjoyed it. The New York jokes, however, were not clear to most members of the Windsor audience. The film was about New York City as much as it was about Allen’s ex-love.

May 16, 1977.
…Finished “Déjà Vu” last night & revised today. On Sunday, sitting in the courtyard, taking notes for the story, I was visited with some rather disturbing thoughts or half-thoughts…emotions…. The idea of déjà vu is in itself disturbing. An illusion, psychologists say. And no doubt it is illusory. But the powerful waves of conviction and certainty aren’t to be so easily discounted. There are times when one
knows
that an experience isn’t altogether new…. The story really did trouble me, as a few stories and one or two novels have done. Writing about Roland Hewitt stirred certain fears…memories…. There were several hours on Sunday when I felt quite distressed. The possibility of falling into a condition like my protagonist’s is so horrible, a kind of living death, yet it
might
happen to anyone, it
might
happen to me…. […]
Drove out to Birmingham today, walked for some time, visited a bookstore, visited Liz. Had lunch (Ray and me, that is) at the Midtown Café. A lovely quiet leisurely rather romantic afternoon. It occurred to me that the sort of grateful leisure retired couples have (like my parents, who now go out frequently and who went out rarely in the past) is something Ray and I have had since our marriage sixteen years ago.

[…]

May 18, 1977.
…Unnaturally hot and humid. Tornado weather. Greenish-orange skies, winds up to fifty-seven miles an hour, pelting rain, a sense of utter chaos. Went for a walk earlier and barely made it home. Millions of seeds blown about, blown against the windows.