The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (40 page)
Read The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates Online
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
[…]
December 16, 1978.
…A flurry of days. Conversations, impressions, snatches of thought; working on
Bellefleur
; but going with unprecedented slowness…nagging myself about it, thinking almost ceaselessly about it (I must begin Jedediah’s little chapter, “The Holy Mountain,” in a few minutes) though I haven’t been able to get to this desk to actually write a word.
…End-of-semester parties. […] Christmas wreath on the door, decorated w/my mother’s ornamentation; Christmas greens in the living room, and some small pink-red lights; outside, twined about a tree in the courtyard, some white lights, also small. No snow yet, but the pond is frozen over. Lovely place. Lovely world.
[…]
…End-of-the-year thoughts. Plans for the future, which we mull over
endlessly. To stay here…or to return, eventually, to Windsor…. I signed the contract w/Dutton yesterday & feel spotless as a lamb: perhaps because the prospect of so much money hasn’t sunk in yet…. This has been, in outward ways, a VERY NICE year; and inwardly too. Happy 1978…!
[…]
Christmas, 1978
…Blissful day, utter solitude: Ray and me, and the menagerie. (Misty, Miranda, Muffin, Tristram, and the parakeet Ariel. How do people become eccentric? Quite by accident!—we never intended to have
four
cats.)
…Exchanging presents last night: a woolen plaid muffler for Ray (who has a cold at this very moment), a ceramic ashtray for the living room (and very handsome it is), a bottle of cologne for me (a beautiful scent which Ray chose, he said, with care). A veal and eggplant dish for dinner, and a salad with every conceivable ingredient; and tonight steak for Ray and fish for me, and baked potatoes and so forth, and so on. Later this week things will become fairly hectic, but at the moment we are idyllically happy; this part of the world, this house, radiate calm.
[…]
…Working on
Bellefleur
& feeling marvelous about it. The relaxation of telling a story…of being frankly melodramatic…of working at that slightly stilted, old-fashioned style…. How much freer and easier (at least at the moment)
Bellefleur
is than
The Evening and the Morning
(which Henry Robbins wants to re-name
Graywolf
!) was…. Looking back, leafing back through this journal (which I haven’t read since coming to Princeton) I was disturbed to see, and to recall, how intensely troubled I was for a while—for quite a while—over the writing of that novel. I remember how stubbornly it shaped itself…how I despaired…how angry I was…and how my anger took the form of an intense, perhaps exaggerated self-criticism. […] It strikes me as strange, now. And I would certainly have forgotten it completely—if I hadn’t recorded it in this journal.
…The fascination of a journal: one “hears” one’s past self, recognizes the time by certain landmarks, identifies once again yet not entirely…there is always something left over…and that something is one’s growth, one’s alteration. Yet I see by reading through the journal of past years that I’ve always been perfectly content with Windsor: with the job, the setting, friends, opportunity to write, etc. So my emphasis this fall on needing to stay here…here in Princeton…has been so strong precisely because there isn’t much behind it…because I want to convince myself. But the droll dry unexciting truth is that I was happy there, I am happy here, it won’t
really
matter where we live.
*
Oates was writing an essay called “Tragic Rites in Dostoyevsky’s
The Possessed
,” which appeared in the fall 1978 issue of the
Georgia Review
and was collected in
Contraries.
*
The poet Howard Moss was at this time the poetry editor at
The New Yorker.
*
Oates is here planning for her novel
Cybele
, which Black Sparrow published in 1979.
*
This uncollected story appeared in the March 1980 issue of
Penthouse.
*
John Gardner’s much-discussed
On Moral Fiction
had just been published.
*
Oates’s editor at the
New Republic
was Roger Rosenblatt. Her review of Howard Nemerov’s
Figures of Thought: Speculations on the Meaning of Poetry, and Other Essays
, appeared in the April 8, 1978, issue.
*
“Snowfall” appeared as a limited edition broadside from Lord John Press in 1978 and was collected in
Invisible Woman
“Small Miracles” appeared in the spring 1981 issue of
Paris Review
and was collected in
Season of Peril.
*
Byron Rourke, Carolyn’s husband, was a colleague of Oates’s at the University of Windsor.
*
The uncollected story “Night Song” appeared in the winter 1978–79 issue of the
Greensboro Review
.
*
At this time Oates was reading intensively in Soviet literature in preparation for the Soviet-American Writers’ Conference, held by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation on April 25–27, 1978.
*
This poem appeared in the spring 1979 issue of
Paris Review.
*
The story “Détente,” inspired by Oates’s involvement in the conference, appeared in the summer 1981 issue of the
Southern Review
and was collected in
Last Days
(Dutton, 1984).
*
This poem appeared in the spring 1981 issue of the
Hudson Review.
*
The poem “Prelude” appeared in the spring 1980 issue of the
Southern Review.
*
“Kristin’s novella” is a reference to a work Oates was planning that eventually became the full-length novel
Angel of Light
(Dutton, 1981).
*
Oates was planning her story “The Doll,” which appeared in the winter 1979 issue of
Epoch.
*
The story Oates was currently working on, “Queen of the Night,” appeared in a special limited edition from Lord John Press in 1979 and was collected in
A Sentimental Education.
*
“The Precipice” appeared in the winter–spring 1979 issue of
Mississippi Review
and was collected in
A Sentimental Education
; the review of Murdoch’s novel appeared in the
New Republic
on November 18, 1978.
*
This uncollected story appeared in the summer 1979 issue of
New England Review.
*
This uncollected story was retitled “Scherzo” and published in the winter 1979 issue of
Ohio Review.
*
This uncollected story appeared in the winter 1980 issue of
Kansas Quarterly.
†
Edmund “Mike” Keeley was one of Oates’s colleagues in the Creative Writing Department at Princeton.
*
Walter Kaufmann and the poet Stanley Kunitz were Princeton colleagues.
The desire to be “utterly normal” and even conventional on the one hand; and to be absolutely free, inventive, wild, unrestrained in the imagination. So that the two worlds appear incompatible. There is no point of contact…. But the unrestrained world is within the “normal” world, it is the normal world’s untold secret.
D
uring the winter and spring of 1979, Joyce Carol Oates remained immersed in her most ambitious novel to date,
Bellefleur.
The journal includes a fascinating, almost daily recounting of her absorption in this “lush” work of the imagination. Later in the year, having completed the novel, she turned to more modest but equally absorbing works, both of them novels told in the form of linked short stories, a genre she had emulated in one of her apprentice novels as a young girl after reading Ernest Hemingway’s
In Our Time.
These novels were
Marya: A Life,
which would not be published until 1986, and
Perpetual Motion,
whose stories were published in magazines but which never appeared in book form. As usual, what Oates called the “logjam” of her proliferating unpublished manuscripts inevitably meant that some projects were consigned to the drawer.
Now settled comfortably in Princeton, Oates tried hard to balance her rigorous work schedule with Princeton’s equally rigorous social calendar. She bemoaned her disinclination to “entertain,” noting the number of unrequited dinner invitations she and Smith were accumulating. What is astonishing, however, is the amount of social life, including dinner parties given by the couple, she managed to fit into her schedule. She also continued to
visit New York regularly, where she socialized with such friends as Donald Barthelme, Susan Sontag, and John Updike. At the same time, she enjoyed the Princeton area’s picturesque natural surroundings, and nature description continues to be one of the journal’s prominent features.
Oates had made peace with her decision to change publishers, and was looking forward eagerly to working with Henry Robbins, one of the most distinguished and celebrated book editors in New York. Among the most notable passages in this year’s entries, then, are those that record Oates’s shock and grief when Robbins died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-one. These passages meditate not only on Robbins and her handful of extremely cordial meetings with him, but also on mortality in general and on the relative meaninglessness of literary “industry” in the face of such an irreparable loss.
What Oates once termed her “tiresome resiliency” served her well, however, and despite Robbins’s death she continued to work doggedly on her manuscripts. Toward the end of the year, she is pondering, with some frustration, a new work to be called
Angel of Light,
the frustration arising from the fact that she couldn’t seem to find the right focus or “voice” for the novel. Soon enough, however, her perseverance would be rewarded.
In all, 1979 is a relatively low-keyed year, but one that found Oates typically enjoying her work life of discipline and restraint even as she indulged with typical abandon in the “unrestrained world” of the imagination.
January 1, 1979.
…Have just returned from a lovely luncheon at Bob and Lynn Fagles’, on Lambert Drive, about five minutes away: good conversation about everything from films to music to Dostoyevsky (with Joe Frank)
*
to Anthony Burgess (the most hilarious tales are told of him here—he’d been in the Creative Writing Program a few years ago)…. I like Bob Fagles enormously and feel a certain kinship, difficult to explain. […]
…Despite the concentration of social life I’ve been able to work on the novel, intermittently, and should begin tomorrow…the chapter “Haunted Things.”…Wrote a review of Stanislaw Lem’s
A Perfect Vacuum
(translated from the Polish)
*
…a Borgesian sort of book, reviews of sixteen non-existent books…rather more exciting in theory than in reality. But it was pleasant to do a book review, after the almost unrelieved intensity of
Bellefleur
, which can leave me somewhat drained.
[…] I have a certain reluctance about entering a social round…such as I sense here…. One part of me is repulsed, another part is halfway charmed: I catch myself day-dreaming while others converse in their bright, lively way (they are so aggressively cheerful, some of them), and wonder why I’m there, why I haven’t remained home, immersed in
Bellefleur
. I’ve never been in so social an environment as Princeton, and wonder if I will survive…. And then of course I begin to feel guilty, for there are a number of dinners I haven’t requited, and probably never will; I simply haven’t the energy, nor have I the skill as a hostess and cook. (Nor do I want that particular sort of skill. Life is too short to waste it on such things!)
January 4, 1979.
…Quiet, dark, rather chilly house. Empty. (Ray is in New York City.) The idyllic nature of silence. Here, at my desk, for hours, since about 8:30 this morning (and now it is 7:30), utterly engrossed with the serpentine coils of language that constitute
Bellefleur
. To experience language minute after minute…the arabesques of language…to utter sentences and phrases aloud (and some of these sentences are ambitiously long)…to feel something spring to life…something indefinable, uncalculable….
…Flaubert & the desire to write a novel about “nothing.” Held together by the strength of its style.
…How could anything, even the most dazzling content, interest the writer more than the precise flow of language, the peculiar exhausting
tyrannical arabesques a certain voice demands…? (Though I would not want to say so, in an interview. For it strikes the ear of the non-writer unpleasantly. Art for art’s sake, etc. But there
is
art only for its own sake. What is done for the sake of something else may be skillful, professional, extremely interesting…but it isn’t art. And it won’t satisfy in the creator the hunger for art’s creation.)
[…]
…Beckett: Failure, not success, interests me.
…Failure excites pity, but also a sense of kinship. Despite my presumed “success” I identify far more readily with outsiders, losers, failures, rejects, misfits, “freaks” than with the successful; which leads me to conclude that everyone does (with the possible exception of the frankly unfortunate, who must desperately identify with—want to identify with—success). As I am, so I assume others are. As I probe my own mind (especially on these days of solitude, with Ray gone, and the house so unusually silent, whatever I discover must relate to everyone. For I’m not a remarkable person. Only, perhaps, keenly interested in how we are constituted, why we behave as we do).
[…]
January 5, 1979.
…Lovely bright cold dry day, a Friday. Drove to New Hope and then north on 32, along the Delaware River; swung around at Frenchtown and returned; had a late lunch at the Center Bridge Inn, a “quaint” but delightful place on the river; talked of innumerable things. (After yesterday, a single day apart, Ray and I seem to have a great many things to talk about…. The magazine; our Princeton social life (which threatens to swell out of control); our Windsor/Detroit friends (some of whom […] are having a bad winter); upcoming plans for New York.)
[…]
…Working, as usual, on
Bellefleur
. Intercalated Christopher Newman from James’s
The American
, in Jean-Pierre’s chapter “The Innisfail Butcher.” The writing, which is really storytelling, goes smoothly. Now on. Goldie and Garth’s wedding. Still feel, occasionally, a kind of mild
anxiety over the length of the novel…its massive and perhaps quixotic ambition…. What if something happens and I can’t finish it, the usual silly phantom-terrors, not to be taken seriously; yet every writer—I suppose every creative artist—feels them.
[…]
January 16, 1979.
…Cold, sunny, quiet, idyllic days. Working on
Bellefleur
as usual; reading, in the evenings, before the fire (Ray reading Garry Wills’
The Inventing of America
, I reading James’s
The American
—delightful of course, but
rather
stretched-out), the kittens scurrying about or sleeping on my lap. How odd it is, that everything I do (or nearly everything) seems to me exactly
right
. And it worries me to think that these quiet simple domestic unexceptional things might so very easily be brushed aside, and events more dramatic sought out in their place.
…Proceeding with
Bellefleur
. Slowly, as usual; yet I suppose since I’ve written 450 pages since Sept. 24 I can’t have gone as slowly as it seems. (This peculiar disjointed time-experience is one of the subjects of the novel. How my working time
feels
as if it were protracted, as if I were, sometimes, crawling on my hands and knees…but, evidently, measured objectively, I write “quickly.”…I will never comprehend the mystery of this…of whatever it is!…this queer unfathomable teasing paradox…. How others evidently view me, and how I view myself.)
…My sense that
my
grasp of time is the correct one. For how could it be otherwise, since it is my own, and “time” can only be experienced subjectively? (It is measured objectively, and experienced subjectively. But of course the two dimensions really ought to coincide.)
[…]
…
Bellefleur
, quite the oddest thing I’ve ever done. And so I pursue it, its image, “chapter” after chapter. What it is, how alarming, how fragmented, insane, I scarcely want to know…. Relief, when it’s finished: or so I imagine. I don’t think I will miss it the way I missed
Son of the Morning
. Or the others. Writing about so many people, treating a number of them quite deliberately as “fictitious characters” in a novel, a
story, a narrative-dominated story, keeps me at a distance. Even with Vernon and Raphael…. I wonder how it will strike me, when I’ve finished. Certainly it feels, it sounds, as I proceed, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and “chapter” by chapter, as close to perfect as I can make it. But there are different rhythms, different expectations. My problem is too fertile an imagination, so that each of the chapters (meant originally to be prose-poems organized around an image) has become much longer than I’d intended…and so it goes, and so…and so it goes….
…No short stories for months. No poems. A few reviews. But nothing else: for everything is swallowed in
Bellefleur
. I wake, I begin to work as early as possible, stagger from the study exhausted (on a “good” day) at sunset…at dark…to begin dinner around seven…usually having finished one of the little chapters; but not always, not invariably, feeling the kind of release I might hope to feel. The novel gathers force, has become a kind of dark voracious current, bearing me along, so that I no sooner finish one unit (the “Noir Vulture”) than I am planning, plotting, trying out voice rhythms, for the next. […]
January 20, 1979.
…Dreary cold snowflurry-riddled day. Grateful for the quiet, the solitude, after the busyness of this week.
…Tea at the Russian Tea Room with Gail [Godwin]. Like the inside of a candy box: pink, white, pink-and-scarlet-and-white, brass fixtures, “impressionist”-romantic paintings, ornate fixtures. Gail looking very good, very attractive. (A mirrorish image of my own face, my own features—so I halfway thought. Do we resemble each other, or is it my imagination? Our curly hair, brown eyes, the set of our bones…. No? Yes? I really can’t say.) Talking of her friend John Irving. Talking of last year’s Breadloaf conference, and John Gardner’s odd behavior.
Son of the Morning
, which she (very kindly) seemed to think was impressive; deeply moving; convincing. (But you must have had experiences like that yourself…? she asked.) Discussing our editors; our domestic lives; what we’ve been reading lately.
[…]
January 25, 1979.
…Pitiless weather: rain, snow, overcast skies. After the furnace broke down, and after it was repaired, how marvelous it felt, simply to be warm again…warm, cozy, lazy, idle, reading & writing & petting the kittens. But of course that’s but a part, the daylight part, of my strange life.
…The “strangeness” never increases, nor does it ebb. A sense, remarkably convincing, at certain times, that we inhabit a body or a vehicle
simultaneously
with another self or spirit, which comes alive (so to speak—in fact it is always alive) when consciousness fades. This “other” self is, or is not, a deeper and more profound self. It’s impossible to say that one prefers it to consciousness, for one doesn’t
know
it.
…The crudeness of the concept of “schizophrenia.” But how crude, really, are most psychological/clinical terms. Like trying to weed an herb garden with an ax. “Schizophrenia”: split self. But all selves are split, at least in consciousness, while we are awake and lucid. A seamless self, not split, would be pure infant, pure psychotic inchoate being.
…The dream as art-work. In some respects more clever, more ingenious, than consciousness; in other respects more primitive. One requires both. One is never free of both. But now one pole tugs, and now another…so the pendulum swings from side to side…a highly “conscious” art, an “unconscious” art…. If we prefer one, very shortly we prefer another. Nothing is permanent.
…Eighteenth anniversary on Tuesday. We drove out to Bucks County, lovely countryside, an almost preternatural afternoon of sunshine (these days it rains
3
/
4
of the time), luncheon at an old inn, Plumsteadville. Lately I’ve been more conscious than usual of being in love with my husband…but that sounds awkward…I mean of watching him, observing, valuing, cherishing…. He is an extraordinary person, in a number of respects: his kindness, his good nature, his sense of humor, his wit (which is so rarely shown in public), his reserve, shyness, intelligence…sweetness…. That he should be so sweet, and that I should have guessed so, eighteen years ago,
what a miracle…. Because when I fell in love I couldn’t possibly have known what love was; I simply became infatuated.