The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (41 page)

[…]

…The dream as art. Art created for its own sake, its own pleasure. No ponderous Freudian overtones, no
meaning
at all. Could this be possible, could
this
be the organizing principle behind the extraordinary phenomena we experience every night…? Joy of creating; joy of problem-solving; inventing; imagining. So images and stories are produced by the dreaming mind, as naturally as we breathe.

…
Bellefleur
, my waking dream. I suspect that I will miss this novel immensely once I’m finished…I will miss its exuberant shameless playfulness. For of course I can never write it again.

February 6, 1979.
…Dazzling sunny days. Working on
Bellefleur
in the mornings, then to the University; luncheon at Prospect; a sense of well-being. Reading, in the evenings, for
The Best American Short Stories 1979
*
…the finest story thus far is Bellow’s “A Silver Dish,” a masterpiece, so powerful it left me somewhat upset for a while afterward. (Thinking of death. Specific deaths, that is. Inevitable, terrible.
That was the way he was
, Bellow says, doubtless talking about his own father.)

…The power of literature to shatter one’s peace of mind. To enter irrevocably into one’s own life.

[…]

…
Bellefleur, Bellefleur.
My obsession these days. No sooner do I finish one little chapter (today, “Mt. Ellesmere”) than my mind leaps ahead to the next. Though I should like some rest between them, and I
will
have some rest…. Page 597. And still a considerable story yet to unfold.

[…]

February 10, 1979.
…Finished my selections for
The Best American Short Stories 1979.
Now to let the stories settle in my mind, and write the introduction in a week or two. A most challenging and pleasant and rewarding project. The Bellow story continues to stand out, and several others. Lovely, the “short story.” As divine a form as any other.

…Snowbound on Wednesday, so no reading at Trenton State College as planned. No class either at Princeton. Thursday, our luncheon meeting canceled, stayed at home working on the novel. Hour after hour after hour. I don’t believe I have ever saturated myself so thoroughly, so tirelessly, in any material. The Bellefleurs stride around in my imagination, quite boldly, even ruthlessly. But their convoluted, tortuous (indeed, torturous) tale will soon be concluded.

…Working on Violet’s little chapter, “The Clavichord.” It goes rather painfully. Like trying to get a sliver out of my finger…. Am now on or thereabouts.

[…]

…White-tailed deer. One of them, a fawn, with a pronounced limp. Snow. Ice on the pond, covered irregularly by snow. A mind casting back and forth, like a net. What will I catch? What will I myself be caught in? Haven’t written poetry, or short fiction, for so long. Even this journal is difficult to turn to, with
Bellefleur
drawing me in. The pleasant thing about an obsession is that it channels all one’s obsessive energies so that nothing is left over. I note in myself, this year, an increased
gravitation
toward writing. There is almost a physical pull, a tugging…to get to this study, to this desk. But why? Whyever? I know enough, I am intellectually mature enough, to understand that I
need
not write; or do anything. I am free, I am self-determined, I am not here on earth merely to create books…ever more complicated lurid garish plots…. […]

February 19, 1979.
…A dusk of heart-stopping beauty. The evergreens are heavy with snow and everything is a languorous blue; and very cold. Mounds, heaps, piles, clumps of snow everywhere. Like waves,
frozen waves. Very beautiful. (Today we were snowbound. I couldn’t get to the University for my class.)

…
Bellefleur, Bellefleur
. The abyss into which I plunge. It is eating away at my heart! A vampirous creation. Feeding it, daily, I am necessarily feeding myself—or am I? “These fragments I have set against my ruin.” Page by page by page. So laboriously hammered out, no one would believe…! By 3:30 this afternoon I was exhausted and could very happily have slept. But played piano for two hours and felt totally renewed…and then have been reading Mike’s Cavafy translations in the original book
Six Poets of Modern Greece.

[…]

February 24, 1979.
…Cold, wet, miserable, with a sore throat, having just returned from New York City. Pouring rain. Impossible to get a cab. The train delayed. The parking lot at Princeton Junction a quagmire. Stayed overnight at the Algonquin—tacky, rather silly. The “literary” hotel! But then literary folks haven’t much taste, or money…. If only I could keep in mind the various minor miseries of this visit: if only they wouldn’t be forgotten within hours, as a consequence of my tiresome resiliency. I would really like
never
to take that train again, or tramp about New York again. Dirty streets, gutters filled with debris, ugly sights, the usual brain-damaged or demented people, etc., etc., but why bother to enumerate the horrors….

And yet: a marvelous evening with Hortense Calisher and Curt Harnack, in their beautiful apartment (Victorian antiques, many paintings, an 1816 Broadwood piano which Hortense herself evidently plays), 205 W. Fifty-seventh St. Irving Howe there also: he seemed rather tired, spoke dispiritedly of his unprepared and unenthusiastic students at City University.
*
I had been looking forward to meeting him, but…but there wasn’t much sense of a distinctive personality, a man of letters, a writer with his own specific vision…. Perhaps he simply
was
tired.

[…]

…Luncheon at Entre Nous with Henry Robbins, Blanche, Ray. How much I like Henry! It disturbed me to learn from [Michael] Arlen that he’d had a heart attack some years ago. And evidently he lives alone…? Was divorced? Sensitive, widely-read, soft-spoken, sweet, intelligent, ah what an ideal editor…what an ideal
person
.

[…]

March 6, 1979.
[…] Query: Is the isolated artist, the person who doesn’t love anyone, isn’t married, or isn’t at any rate successfully married, haunted by dreams of
normality
…? I mean, does he or she resent the ostensibly “normal,” and consider the artistic life something of a heroic (or involuntary) sacrifice? To balance “normality” and “the extraordinary” isn’t so difficult as one might think, from within. But I suppose it’s like wanting money when you haven’t any, or wanting someone to love you when no one’s available or interested…one tends to value what is absent, and exaggerate its worth. “High-Wire Artist”:
*
an exaggeration of certain tendencies I see in myself and others. To wish to be isolated (that is, “superior”)…but at the same time to suffer a diminution of one’s humanity…. The more intensely one’s spirit is poured into one’s work, the less intensely life itself can be lived; for even if there’s a spirit remaining there certainly isn’t time. And yet…! The high-wire act beckons. It is only on the high wire that life (seen from a great distorted distance) attains its curious sentimental worth, being out of reach. One’s pulses hum on the high wire, one cannot be less than painfully alert for an instant.

[…]

March 13, 1979.
…Life plunges in a torrent past me. Today, yesterday, tomorrow: too many people; and always the tug of
Bellefleur
, my center of gravity.

…Finished the novel on Saturday. Including the Epilogue, which I believe I will omit. And to offset a possible attack of melancholy I began at once to work on the introduction to
The Best American Short Stories 1979
(Of which I am halfway proud. And the stories—! The stories seem to me wonderful.)

[…]

…Began revising
Bellefleur
before the ache of its loss hits. The first chapter was rougher than I had anticipated but seems fairly satisfactory now. And on to the second, and the third….

…Life, examined minutely, is a matter of endless, totally absorbing tasks. One completes them and moves on. I suppose I am no more absurd than anyone else though I seem to have more consciousness of my absurdity than others. Yet it isn’t, exactly,
absurdity
I feel…. A kind of odd directionless levity.

…
How
will this all turn out, one asks innocently. The answer: Exactly as it appears at this very moment.

…Teaching until 5:20, and quite drained afterward. I note that I have been “drained,” “exhausted,” etc., etc., for years after these long teaching sessions. Yet I continue teaching; obviously I don’t mind the excursions into my soul…. […]

March 21, 1979.
…Spring. And so it is: sixty-four degrees already, at 9
A.M.
Mockingbirds outside the window. Kittens frolicking. Lovely blue sky. And all is exceedingly well.

…Revising
Bellefleur
. Now that I have finished it I feel so pleased: as much with my new freedom as with the novel, the massive thing, itself. 820 pages. 820 pages! Never again will I attempt anything so huge.

[…]

…Walking miles these days, in the country, in Princeton. How many thousands of miles have we walked together, Ray and me, since our marriage…! The dailyness of life, never preserved. It doesn’t seem to matter, now, tonight, that we had a pleasant dinner together…that this afternoon we had lunch on the terrace for the first time this year, in the sunshine…all four cats
nearby, and the parakeet on the wall…. Nothing matters when it is within reach, when it’s a matter of the dailyness of living; I mean, it doesn’t matter in terms of recording. But once gone it will seem invaluable in the memory. So I must record these things, I must put everything down…

…The lifting of that mild anxiety of last fall and winter, that I wouldn’t complete
Bellefleur
. Now life is easy, astonishingly easy. The revisions I am doing aren’t radical; don’t take many hours out of the day; are absolutely reasonable and pragmatic. I do admit that thinking about
Graywolf
once again is unsettling…and perhaps I should turn to some short stories first, before plunging into another novel. […]

March 24, 1979.
…Gray lewd winds. Rain. My study an absolute oasis: scattered & heaped with the manuscripts of two novels, one of them the enormous
Bellefleur
. (Revising
B
. But also, alternately,
Graywolf: Life and Times
.)

…Revision. Could anything be more pleasant, more engrossing, and yet not (and this is important!) upsetting? There is no mystery, why writers want to revise and revise…why some writers are reluctant to make an end…for the first draft is so difficult, so groping and choppy and obtuse and bewildering, one hardly wants to begin another project; one would like to remain forever with what is known, what has been conquered.

…To,
Graywolf
. Not revision so much as complete rewriting. Every chapter, every scene, every page, rewritten. Though I know the novel will probably never be published. For I much prefer
Bellefleur
, and will ask Henry to substitute that novel for this. (
Graywolf
being the novel that Henry read originally, and offered a contract for, bringing me to Dutton.) But it’s a vehicle, an exciting vehicle, a way of channeling certain ideas that have come to me since last spring, which fit in beautifully with Johanna and her friends….

[…]

April 5, 1979.
…Recalling 1970, 1971…the early stages of what was probably anorexia…when I weighed 95–98 pounds for a while, and
had no appetite: or, rather, what should have been an appetite for food went into an “appetite” for other things. (I say for a
while
but it was a considerable period of time. And I’m not yet free of the old psychological aspects of that experience…about which I can’t talk altogether freely.)

…The appeal of “anorexia” is no mystery. Perhaps a number of mysteries. A way of controlling and even mortifying the flesh; a way of “eluding” people who pursue too closely; a way of channeling off energy in other directions. The mystic “certainty” that fasting gives…a “certainty” that isn’t always and inevitably wrongheaded. For I remember mornings, driving down to the University of Windsor, I remember the look of the river, and the sky, and my thoughts flying ahead…the sense of drama, risk, exaltation…all combined with a part of my life I can’t discuss…but there it is, a tiny nugget or kernel, still with me, no longer dominating my thoughts but still available should I want to
think
about it….

…Anorexia is a controlled and protracted form of suicide, literally. But figuratively & symbolically it means much more. No one wants to be
dead
—! But there is the appeal of Death. The romantic, wispy, murky, indefinable incalculable appeal…which seems to me now rather silly; but I remember
then
. Yet it isn’t even Death that appeals so much as a transformed, exalted vision of oneself…a sense that one has transcended the gross, physical level. (But then I never disliked my body. I had as much adolescent pride in it, I suppose, as anyone else. Being told the other day that someone had told Ray at dinner how beautiful I was, one Friday evening at dinner, with people in Bucks Co., I thought—Is it possible! But in whose eyes, and in what sort of deceptive lighting? It only makes me uneasy, this sort of well-intentioned flattery, because of course then one must live up to it; one feels one should, anyway. And the external being is so irrelevant, finally.)

[…]

April 6, 1979.
…Marvelous poetry reading yesterday by Maxine Kumin. Though Max said she was nervous—
extremely
nervous—she read her poems beautifully (and they are beautiful poems, among them her
elegy for Anne Sexton, and another elegiac poem set in the St. Louis zoo, Maxine and Howard Nemerov as characters) to a quite good audience in the Firestone Library, second floor. Then an unusually pleasant reception; then dinner at an Indian restaurant just this side of New Brunswick—a
most
uproarious evening […].