The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (29 page)

July 28, 1977.
…From New York City to Bennington, Vt.; the Robinsons’ handsome old enormous house on Monument Circle, and the Malamuds’ large, airy, beautifully-decorated home on Catamount Lane (Bernard Malamud surprisingly formal, articulate, when I had expected a looser, more garrulous person, more of a drinker also; Ann Malamud delightful, attentive & alert & friendly & hospitable)…from Bennington to Dartmouth/Hanover, New Hampshire; from Hanover to Middlebury, Vt.; from Middlebury to Silver Bay/Lake George, NY; from there to Ithaca (Cornell’s large, intimidating, finally rather odd campus: a kind of gigantic jumble in which good things might be too easily lost); from Ithaca to Lockport/Millersport (a good visit with my parents once again); and then home.[…]

…Bernard Malamud is a complex, intelligent (highly intelligent!), soft-spoken and
well
-spoken man; a gentleman; called me “my dear” several times. Fairly slender, very attractive, w/a small moustache, handsome horn-rimmed glasses, somewhat arthritic (his back: he must sleep on a board, and had a board-arrangement of some kind at the dinner table). Seemed quite pleased to see us though Ray and I were strangers […]. Spoke of his writing (
The Fixer
was intended to be a sort of folktale, not
a “historical” novel) and his writing habits (he works from nine until one most days; teaches at Bennington only one quarter of the year, and then only one course—or so I gathered) and reviews/reviewers (a subject on which he elaborated at dinner…like all writers I’ve met he seems to dislike reviewers in general and certain reviewers—Roger Sale—in particular; he was quite passionate on the subject) and various items of gossip […]. Bernard telephoned John [Gardner], who came over after dinner w/his girl Elizabeth (attractive, dark, quiet; or perhaps simply intimidated by John’s strong personality, and Bernard’s presence). A memorable evening for a number of reasons. (The Malamuds live in such a striking location: in Bennington from March until Nov. Enviable life.)

July 30, 1977.
…Long ago when such things were new, and rare, and alarming, we used to celebrate Events of Good Fortune. The acceptance of my first book at Vanguard, in the God-awful days of Beaumont, Texas, 1961…the signing of a movie contract option (which brought amounts of money astonishing to us at that time: $30,000, $50,000)…random sales, or prizes (the O. Henry), or grants (Guggenheim), or awards (National Book). Then gradually, or was it suddenly?—the Events of Good Fortune became almost ordinary events and there was no need to celebrate them. Hardly any need to speak of them in detail. Or at all. Until finally it came about that I could receive a check for $85,000 in the mail and not think to tell my husband about it until later in the day, or the next day. Or I could glance through a copy of
Time
in a drugstore (not wishing to buy it, of course) and come upon a fairly good review of, say,
The Assassins
, and skim through it as though it were a review of anyone’s book, of any book at all, not my own, not related to me.

It isn’t that one expects such things. Or feels, in a way, comfortable with them. Or even wants them very badly. It’s instead a peculiar thing…an ineffable thing…. Perhaps that they happen, they
happen
, without any personal intervention. Or meaning. Or…what?…connection. Relevance. Intimacy.

[…]

August 4, 1977.
[…] Anne Sexton’s letters improve as she grows older.
*
It’s curious, how she becomes suddenly sober, leaves behind her manner (or mask) of hyperbolic enthusiasm, when confronted with truly disturbed people writing to her. It’s as if she recognized the sickness in them and for the time being became well, herself, in order to deal with their sickness. The letters to Philip Legler, and even to James Dickey, show this. But then again on the next page she’s gushing, and rambling, and typing away late into the night though obviously unhinged by alcohol and her eight nightly pills…. What is disappointing about the letters is their general lack of enlightenment. One can’t learn much from them. There is no intellectual stimulation, no sense of an ongoing inquisitive critical exploring mind. She’s all emotion: heart and womb, tears and blood, a voice that sometimes rises to hysteria, sometimes sinks to a melancholy whine, but isn’t often enough detached, self-critical (in a genuine sense: she is of course self-pitying and self-contemptuous, self-despising). What one misses, undeniably, is a first-rate intelligence…. Which leads us back to the poems. And they are, for the most part, good.
All My Pretty Ones, Live or Die
, certain sections of
Love Poems
: very good, very powerful indeed.
Transformations
I don’t care for, but perhaps that is simply my taste.
The Awful Rowing Toward God
(which I reviewed for the
NY Times
) is intermittently good, sometimes striking and sometimes flat. Her problem was that subject matter and technique seem to have been inextricably wedded. She turns round and round and round on the same subjects, in the same rhythms. Trapped. Helpless. There’s terror in it—one feels the terror. But the reader can simply back away or turn to another poet (Maxine Kumin, for instance, Anne’s friend, who is a finer poet than Anne, partly because she is more “intelligent” but partly because she has a better feel for language) while poor Anne Sexton was imprisoned in that dreary stale shrinking world.

…Bernard Malamud at dinner, discussing D. H. Lawrence. And Updike: whose novels, he thinks, lack an inner “moral” focus or core. (Is he right? I said to the Malamuds, “Updike has a painterly, a visual, imagination…he wants to get things accurate on the sensory level first of all…”
or words to that effect. But this doesn’t preclude a “moral” position. Why should it?) Malamud felt somewhat the same way about Roth. More than most writers, Malamud said, Roth does write about his own life—a book-by-book account of his woman-by-woman career. Which is dreadfully limiting…. Thinking back on Malamud I suppose he was being rather cautious with Ray and me, rather guarded. He didn’t know us at all…. Generous of him, certainly, to have invited us to his home.

August 6, 1977.
…Finished the Anne Sexton letters; did the review; as time passed the effort did not seem quite so depressing as it did initially. After all, Anne Sexton
did
accomplish what she wanted. Or nearly. It seems likely that her poetry postponed her suicide for years…the activity of poetry, the rigorous demands of its discipline: these are only, and always, good. Which is something non-poets can’t understand, perhaps.

Went back to a story written some time ago, “Honeymoon,” to review a few pages. Written in June 1975. Something very warm, likable about it…hopeful….

Odd that I should so enjoy revision, when I once detested it. Considered it a waste of time. Energy. Imagination. But now, well, now it all seems different to me: revision
is
imagination. And it’s also immensely satisfying in ways that the initial writing can’t be.

The pleasure of detachment: serenity: rigorous structuring, calculating.

…Anne Sexton’s death-premonitions. Hence her feverish activity at the end. One might think it strange (I don’t: I think it perfectly explicable) that she should fear a premature death, yet bring it about herself.

But why die, why take one’s self so seriously…. There are always new films, new recordings, chance letters from old friends, telephone calls, books propelled through the mail, magazines….

Gene [McNamara] once said: “Why not just take a nap, and when you wake up you’ll feel differently.”

Some of us are too normal, too healthy, to comprehend—that is, to
really
comprehend, for as a novelist I haven’t any difficulty—the despair that drags one to death. Anne Sexton in her letter to me spoke of my ability to deal with this anguish. Yet it isn’t me. Yet, in a way, it must be me, for who else could it be? It might reside simply in the Unconscious, in the transpersonal psyche…if one believes in such a phenomenon. (Sometimes I do, at other times I don’t.) Or it might be invented, imagined. For shouldn’t a novelist work at the effort of imagining…?

[…]

August 22, 1977.
[…] Fascinating, to read Dostoyevsky’s Notebooks for
The Possessed
. The difficulty he had in imagining the novel as we know it…the tortuous slowness with which Stavrogin emerged, and the political theme itself; how close, I wonder, did Dostoyevsky come to giving up and writing the romantic near-formless novel he had envisioned? How inferior it would have been to
Crime and Punishment
,
The Idiot
,
Notes from Underground
….

Mystery of the “creative process.” What an insipid term! Means nothing, really.
Creative process
.

Dostoyevsky’s pathetic suffering re. fits, headaches, indigestion, etc. A wonder he was able to write at all, let alone to write masterpieces.

Enigma. Utter mystery. He, perhaps, is more truly
inexplicable
than even his characters.

[…]

…A query Dostoyevsky makes to himself early in the notes for
The Possessed
:
N.B. Is this novel necessary?

Interesting to note that Dostoyevsky in talking to himself, in thinking aloud re. his projected novel, is rather like Henry James talking to himself; and rather like me. Do all authors sound alike? In their notes? What happens, then, between the notebooks and the completed book…?

…Impressed w/the sluggish, painful evolution of the novel, of the characters, plot, controlling ideas, etc. Is such labor justified? Who would work so very hard if he knew ahead of time all that he would suffer (through frustration, despair, and actual physical discomfort)? Of course the finished work justifies itself. It always does. Or usually. (Though I recall Joyce putting the first copy of
Ulysses
beneath his chair, in a restaurant where he and his family were celebrating its publication. Looking deflated, or somehow tired. According to Ellmann. The pity of it, yet the naturalness. What has the author to do with the material product that comes at the very end of his labor…. )

…Query: Can an author actually
read
his own work? And if so, how? With what interior “voice”? Must he have forgotten it (more or less) before he can read it? A necessary but perhaps impossible detachment.

“The madness of art”—James’s phrase.

Graywolf: His Life and Times
. I think I will scrap the whole thing.

August 23, 1977.
…Mom and Dad visiting this week. Yesterday, marvelous weather: we sat for a while in the courtyard, then down at the beach; went for a long walk to dinner in Windsor; walked along the riverfront admiring the Detroit skyline. Windsor must be, for its size, one of the most attractive cities in North America. One
sees
it through the eyes of visitors. Of course everyone complains here, it is the policy, the convention, to complain; “intellectuals” above all like to complain, to show their dissatisfaction with all things above and beneath. But, still. Compared to expensive trash-strewn New York City and grim drab dangerous Detroit with its ludicrous contrasts of Poverty & Wealth….

Feeling quite good. The visit is going well. In fact I was nonplussed for a few minutes yesterday when my parents arrived—looking so very good, so (almost) glamorous. One could never guess at the lives they once led…the backgrounds they rose from…the handicaps, the stupid twists of luck, fate…. My mother with her curly hair, red slacks and a very pretty white blouse with a bow; a silver bracelet I once gave her; attractive white open
toed shoes. My father with handsome trousers and a rather stylish sports coat, not quite so heavy as I remembered (though since he stopped smoking he seems to have gained weight permanently). At home they swim nearly every day, my mother
¹
/4 mile, my father
¹
/2 mile, which is to my thinking considerable. (I doubt that I could make one lap, without gasping and flailing about. I haven’t swum in years, in years.)…My mother brought jam, peaches, tomatoes, a cantaloupe, a kitchen towel, a sweater for Ray she had knitted. A very pleasant visit, in fact delightful. And today looks clear also. (We are going to Liz and Jim’s this evening, then out to Jim’s golf club for dinner.)[…]

August 24, 1977.
…Delightful evening, yesterday. Took my parents to the Renaissance Center, then out to Birmingham; to Quarton Lake; to the Grahams’, and then to the Kingsley Inn; returned home after midnight. A long day. Everything went well, in fact splendidly.

[…]

Irony. My father was very amusing, telling Liz and Jim and Liz’s mother about his comic-grotesque experience raising pigs many years ago (both Liz and Jim had relatives who raised pigs, or lived on farms themselves—I’m not sure which): the pigs burrowing under the fence, running out onto Transit Road, his catching them by hand after much difficulty, and throwing each of them (large creatures) back over the fence so that they landed heavily on their sides and the “earth shook.” Shortly afterward he killed them, and slaughtered them, and “cured” them with some sort of salt-gun injection; and hung the meat up in the barn; and the meat rotted. (Which makes a very funny story, especially as he tells it, with his understated manner and his expression of profound, almost quizzical disgust, as if the memory of the incident still baffled him—and this bafflement is part of the anecdote.) I know, however, that the situation wasn’t funny. He tried to raise pigs because we were very poor. It was poverty behind the desperation…and it was a sort of tragedy that, after all the humiliating effort, the meat rotted. How interesting it is, then, that thirty or more years later the incident can be retold, perhaps even re-imagined, as an anecdote. A story. A story meant to amuse. For now their lives have changed considerably—completely. There’s no danger of a repetition of the poverty
of decades ago, or the fear and bitterness that attended it. So, sitting in the elegant living room of a $200,000 home in Birmingham, Michigan, telling his story to a vice president of one of the most wealthy of contemporary “companies” (or is Gulf & Western a sort of empire?—“company” sounds so feeble), he can be, in a way, elegant himself: a storyteller confident of his audience and of his own ability (which turns out to be considerable) to entertain. I think this is all profoundly, profoundly interesting…and enigmatic only to me…. There was talk, too, of a kind one never experiences in a family, but only in the presence of others: about ancestors, backgrounds, etc. It turns out that my mother’s father’s name was Bus (Hungarian—and changed by immigration authorities to Bush) and that he was the first Hungarian to come to the Buffalo area; my father’s father’s name was James, and he and his brother Patrick came to the Lockport area from Ireland (exactly where he doesn’t know), and from the two of them are descended a number of Oateses in that area. (Yet I’ve never come across an Oates anywhere—not even in Joyce’s
Ulysses
.) Hungarian, Irish, and a mixture of French, German, and English: my background. Which seems lavish enough.