The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (39 page)

October 27, 1978.
[…] Lovely days. Working on
Bellefleur
in the morning, and then driving to Princeton; working in the evening if I’m not too exhausted; bicycle-riding whenever we can, and walking, one windy sunny morning on the grounds of the Institute for Advanced Study, through their woods. And seeing people: a superb evening with Walter and Hazel Kaufmann (she’s a beautiful, gracious, charming woman) and Stanley Kunitz (whom I like more all the time).
*
Talk of Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt (whom neither Walter nor Stanley thought much of), Princeton, poetry, mutual acquaintances. People do seem somewhat overly critical of one another here…which makes me wonder, uneasily, what on earth they must say about me behind my back…! For assuredly they do say something, and I rather doubt that it can all be nice.

…Odd pleasures. Solitary driving, walking. Strolling through campus. Reading magazines & journals in Firestone Library yesterday. Going to the English Dept. party for undergraduates (where I spent most of the time talking to Mike Keeley, who is sweet, unpretentious, amiable, charming, perhaps too amiable, since people tend to underrate him; and Carol Rosen, a young assistant professor who teaches courses in English and drama)…. Picked Ray up at the train station, 10:30
P.M.
Then back here for a delicious snack-dinner of hamburgers on pita buns, and several cheeses…for which I was famished, not having eaten since breakfast. And so the days go, the same day goes, seemingly the same, rolling toward me and then past me, never ceasing to amaze….

…Growing older. Growing old. I rather suspect, judging from myself, that no one, however intelligent,
expects
it. Or can quite grasp it. Certainly everyone knows that his face will age…there will be, there must be, lines, wrinkles, disappointing pouches…yet do we really expect them? Do we comprehend them?

[…]

…
Bellefleur
,
Bellefleur
. Writing for hours yesterday, lovely uninterrupted intense exhausting marvelous fruitful hours, hours. And today I feel free, and very cheerful. Except, a sobering thought: I am already and my heroine hasn’t gotten herself born.

[…]

November 4, 1978.
…Intending to begin work on
Bellefleur
very early this morning, I unaccountably did not…and at the moment, at this moment, it is 6:30
P.M.
and pitch-black and I have done nothing; or almost nothing; and well….

…Along Aunt Molley’s Road this morning we saw a kitten: white-faced, with gray spots on an ear and part of its forehead. And then another appeared, almost identically marked. Two abandoned kittens, about five weeks old. Mewing hungrily. Showing absolutely no fear of me. Since there were no houses for miles, and the kittens
were
obviously abandoned, there was nothing else to do but bring them home and feed them and…and all afternoon Molly and Muffin have been sleeping on my lap (as I read Updike’s rather clotted, dense, Nabokovian, but excellent
The Coup
, and listened to Chopin’s fifty-one mazurkas, of which I am deeply moved by almost too many of them…particularly the last one he wrote, his farewell to the piano itself…. Awkward grammar but no matter; it’s late, dinner must be prepared, I haven’t approached
Bellefleur
—the chapter “Horses”—I feel both giddy and guilty, lazy and harassed)…sleeping and then waking and biting and rolling about, and being fed (warmed milk and cat food soaked in milk), and scratching energetically in their kitty litter, which they’ve taken to with admirable alacrity. (Perhaps their shrewd chromosomes have absorbed the meaning and uses of litter itself…. )

…Much is going on, elsewhere. I suppose I will be leaving Vanguard. Do I feel regret?—uneasiness?—guilt? I do, I certainly do. Yet
why
, I don’t really know. Vanguard did reject my most recent novel, in a graceful, oblique way.
The Evening and the Morning
was too “experimental” for them. Yes. And so, I could shelve it; or give it to John Martin. And then the new contract, with its grudging, minimal terms, exactly the same terms offered (and accepted) five years ago…no accounting for infla
tion, for my (ostensible) growth, even for such obvious public honors as the American Academy and Institute election. Vanguard, by being so mean, so economic-minded, gambled and lost…for I believe I will be going to Dutton, to Henry Robbins (whom Joan Didion has called “the best editor in America”). The contract will be for five books, the same five, but the terms will be much higher […]. I hadn’t any choice, really…. But still…. Still. My affection for Evelyn is very real. It has been fifteen years, after all. (I keep asking myself why they rejected the novel so bluntly, without even suggesting revisions; why they refused to offer as much as $1000 more than the old contract…. Were they thinking simply of
saving money
? Obviously my indifference to money for so long, and my modesty or backwardness or—or whatever!—allowed them to think that they could always deal with me without complications…. Spoke to Henry Robbins on the phone the other day; he seems awfully nice, and enthusiastic too. He would like to “immerse” himself in my writing….

[…]

November 10, 1978.
…Working on
Bellefleur
. About to begin “Nocturne.” Another Indian summer day, lovely & mild. Life seems so…so accelerated….

[…]

…I can’t, for some reason, seem to get
hold
of life here. Of a reasonable schedule here. I seem to want to write at all times. To write at
Bellefleur
continuously. Continually. It spills over onto everything, into everything, a nagging tugging sensation…that I
should
be working on the novel while in fact I am doing a dozen other things. But I can’t write all the time. I shouldn’t write all the time. I shouldn’t even think of such a bad thing.

…When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)—then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly—why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing.

…Complaints of loneliness at Princeton. Students isolated, under pressure, as guilty as I (evidently) if they “enjoy” themselves for very long. An interview in the newspaper, various articles, and my own students’ comments…. But perhaps loneliness is the human condition. Broken intermittently by flashes of something else: camaraderie, friendship, “love.” Too much social life & one hungers for seclusion. Too much seclusion & one hungers for social life. A pendulum back and forth. No rest, no stasis. At the age of forty I really don’t know…do I need people very much, or is it all a kind of illusion, surrounding oneself with friends, imagining needs, connections, exchanges…? The work, the work, everyone thinks here at Princeton, the work is permanent; or nearly so. Everything else quickly fades. And that
is
true. The present tense in which we live is, paradoxically, misted over with a sense of the unreal. Can anything that passes by so swiftly be less than
unreal?—fiction?
…But it is also the case that the meditating, brooding, ceaselessly rummaging consciousness isn’t the entire person, and perhaps knows very little of the entire person. I “think” I might be autonomous, like the defiant young Henry David Thoreau; but I may very well be, like David Henry Thoreau (the young man’s real name), presenting an unreal, wished-for persona, to myself if not to the world. How does one
know
the first truth about oneself…?

…
Bellefleur
is going to be long. Very long. It moves slowly, despite the “pace” of its narrative, its storytelling quality. Slowly slowly slowly. Calmly. For, after all, there is no hurry.

[…]

November 19, 1978.
…A quiet weekend. Working on the novel, on Jedediah’s chapter (“The Vision”), which went rather smoothly. Am now. It goes slowly, slowly. But I begin to feel more confident about it: the vastness of it, I mean. Reading & rereading the notes gives me an almost clear sense of its shape….

…
Why
do I take on these quixotic, “ambitious” schemes? After
Bellefleur
I promise myself easier, scaled-down novels, realistic novels of the sort I love to read; and to write also. (How I enjoyed
Unholy Loves,
particularly the last revision!)…A series of human, very human, short sto
ries.

…Yesterday, what should be our last bicycle ride of the season. To Princeton and back, by way of Pretty Brook Lane; about twelve miles; idyllic for the most part, except, on the return home, the day grew suddenly cold and a November wind blew…. Marvelous exercise. Left us both somewhat shaky-kneed for a while.

…The pleasures of solitude. In such severe contrast with my week at the University: MondayTuesdayWednesday jammed together. I don’t get home until after five—until after dark. And then Thursday we are invited to Thanksgiving Dinner at Charles and Holly Wright’s (along with Mike and Mary Keeley), an evening I am looking forward to. And Friday we drive to Boston for the conference, at the Sheraton-Boston. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Returning home Sunday afternoon.

[…]

…Many hours at the piano. Playing the Eleventh Nocturne, an exquisitely beautiful piece which haunts me. Listening to Nikita Magaloff playing the fifty-one mazurkas, a London album I bought some weeks back and have nearly worn out…. What is there to say about such music! One can only listen, and listen…. Perhaps the entire human condition is expressed by Chopin. But no: he goes beyond it: there simply isn’t anything one can
say
about certain of his compositions. To listen to them is extraordinary enough, but to attempt to play them…. To feel the melody, the texture of the sounds, flowing through one’s fingertips, as if one
were
somehow Chopin, a vessel, a vehicle, for the remarkable compositions that sprang from his imagination and were tempered so rigorously by his skill…! Well, there’s no point in talking about it. It would be easier, really, to capture the essence of our hearty bicycle ride yesterday, or our cheerful, intimate dinners (I am beginning to enjoy cooking again, in a modest way) and evenings, lazily reading, a fire in the fireplace, kittens on our laps, etc. The most domestic of lives: the most blessed. And
Bellefleur
is a strategic balance lest things seem to be
too
placid.

November 30, 1978.
[…] Flannery O’Connor’s disappointing orthodoxy. Which the fiction doesn’t exactly defy, if one investigates it care
fully enough. There is a superficial rebelliousness which might be misread by those who would save her from her own Catholicism.

…In essence, what is wrong with the “Christian” position is that it denies evil in creation & in the creator. Hence it refuses to recognize evil’s reality, evil’s energy, as well. Other religions of course aren’t so naïve…or so self-righteous. The Christian too readily projects his own evil out onto someone else; or the Devil. A silly position psychologically since evil—what passes for evil—is usually far more interesting, more inventive, than “good.”

…Melville: “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.” But was this written to Hawthorne with an air of childlike glee, or faint guilt, or wonderment, or…? If I feel that I have written a “wicked” story (or in the case of
Wonderland
a wicked novel) it must be because…well, why?…it can only be because I haven’t brought the fictional characters round to my own position…haven’t “resolved” their fate as I suppose I seem to be resolving my own, as it unfolds. I can imagine a psychologically & socially healthy life for myself, or seem to be imagining it, in fact without much strain; but I don’t always imagine this wholeness for my fictional people.

…Why should I? I do what I will.

…Melville’s & Ahab’s pact with the Devil. Since there
is
no Devil, but there are certainly devilish human beings, and parts of human beings, one must assume that Melville like Ahab felt he had entered into a kind of communion with the secret, repressed (?) aspects of his own soul. Ahab’s monomania, his hatred for God. His hatred for Life itself. (How inconvenient, that Moby Dick isn’t female!—the allegory would be even more fascinating.) Hatred…vanity…egoism…crippledness…stuntedness…half-man…impotence…absurd inflation of one’s importance…recklessness instead of reasoned courage…. Hubris; the tragic “hero”; the doomed totemic hero. If I were to descend into my own self, there to ruthlessly seek out buried, secret, “forgotten” images, would this be a wise, even a pragmatic undertaking, or would it be psychologically dangerous…?
Bellefleur
is saved from being unsettling because it is so
much a story or stories. It remains in motion. At the moment Raphael II is squatting by Mink Pond, watching a marsh wren; and at other points in time, decades earlier, other Bellefleurs are doing other things. I must begin thinking about “The Walled Garden.” (How odd, that the scene in the garden was the first scene I’d imagined, for this novel. The baby Germaine and her mother…the high stone walls…. And now I am and this opening scene is just beginning!)

…Melville’s depths. Profundity. One cannot exhaust him, one must return to him.

[…]

December 12, 1978.
…Working on
Bellefleur
, hour upon hour, and nothing suits me better; nothing is more richly, lavishly, lushly rewarding. Have just finished a minute ago the chapter “Paie-de-Sables” and now it is almost 11
P.M.
and apart from an afternoon at the University […] I have been working on the novel all day. It is so entirely engrossing, so mesmerizing…. Why, I wonder, don’t we all sink into our obsessions, and disappear from view?