The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (53 page)

…Surely the danger is universal, and many have succumbed: to assimilate one’s husband or wife so seamlessly into one’s self that virtually nothing remains that is “other” and can be witnessed. This is called “taking for granted” but it has subtle and corrosive aspects, almost too many to be defined. It isn’t an exaggeration—
or is it?
—to observe that the pleasures of existence that appear to be effortless and given (our bicycle rides through this beautiful countryside, for instance; reading a good book; writing; meeting with friends) are supported invisibly by love…by the stability and permanence of marriage…or anyway
this
marriage,
this
relationship. (For I have no doubt but that a rotten marriage could poison everything—even the landscape.) To look, and to look again. To actually see.
See
. To realize one’s ongoing good fortune without being absurd about it or lapsing into sentimentality….

…Dinner tonight at the Fagles’.

…(What have I been brooding upon lately?…a minor obsession. The Wall. But as I explore it The Wall isn’t only what I have been thinking…it’s also, to be very specific, to be absolutely specific, the
fact
of the Germans—i.e., the Nazis—having poisoned the twentieth century. Is this it? Is this it, so bluntly? I keep thinking and thinking and…my mind turns…turns upon the
fact
which is inescapable, and indeed a wall, that people like Bob and Lynn Fagles, and Eleanor and Michael Goldman, people of incalculable worth and personal charm and intelligence…would have been, if the Nazis had their way, “exterminated.” Now all this is obvious, all this is “history,” but I keep thinking about it in specific terms…in very local terms. The Wall is, among other things (and there are many things of course—the East/West paranoia for one), simply this fact. This
ugly fact. Which no German, however humane and liberal and “guilt-burdened,” can alleviate. Hitler & the Nazis & the articulated wish of the “Teutonic” people—not only to commit genocide but, in a sense, to destroy the world—to almost literally poison the world, and the future. This is the wall I keep banging my head against…. Was there ever so futile an exercise!…and so commonplace as well. Not a predictable subject for me, for my “brooding.” And what can be done anyway…?)

July 7, 1980.
[…] Working on “My Warszawa.”
*
Hour upon hour upon hour. So much comes spilling and bubbling out, so much am I Judith and Susan Sontag combined and a fictitious other, a third woman….

…Yet it’s Germany, the hateful Wall, hateful German history that stays with me. Instead of dissipating as the days pass this uncanny mood expands and deepens. What to make of it! I feel trapped in a fate not (by heritage) my own.

[…]

…Warsaw, the “occupied” zone, a place of subtle and not-so-subtle poisons. To work the three or four threads, the motifs, without allowing any to predominate…. The “Jewishness” of one’s spirit in such parts of the world is a queer, queer thing. Certainly I have
never
experienced it before.

…Will this heavy mood lift?—will “Germany” ever evaporate?

July 12, 1980.
…6:10
P.M.
Have been working most of the day on “My Warszawa.” Reliving, seeing again, walking along certain streets…hearing again certain voices.

…Always, the instinct: I don’t want to hurt anyone, my fiction will hurt, cannot escape hurting, it is in the very nature of “fiction” to strike deeply and to hurt…but, still, I don’t want to hurt anyone; our Polish friends, guides.

…These days pass, and are exquisitely beautiful. I can’t believe that I have ever been so happy. The vastness of the day, the promise, the solitude, the hours of work in the morning; luncheon on the terrace; a bicycle ride or a walk (yesterday to Titusville, our first visit in a long time, and we went to the antique clock shop, and Ray bought me a German 400-day clock, a belated birthday present); sometimes we read in the afternoon […]. It seems a marvelous gift, the possibility of my preparing our own dinner. After so many weeks of eating out, sitting through banquets in our honor. And so on, and so forth. To do anything, however menial,
for oneself.
To clean the kitchen cupboards, to vacuum, to go through the usual batch of submissions for the magazine…a rare privilege. To be home, to be responsible, to have an identity, to be an
adult
. Not waited on, made much of, driven about in limousines and vans, honored, toasted, flattered, admired…. The impersonation of the “distinguished American writer Joyce Carol Oates” is an act I find uncomfortably easy to do.

…With all these blessings, and the telephone rings yesterday, and Karen Braziller informs me (in a wonderfully breathless girlish voice) that
Bellefleur
has received a front-page review in the Sunday
Times
for July 20; that it is very positive; by John Gardner.
*

…A positive review in the
Times
is analogous to, what?—being told that one hasn’t got cancer. The relief is overwhelming. Elation, gratitude, simple happiness come later if at all. For it isn’t reviewers’ opinions (except in the case of a very special reviewer like John Gardner) that matter to us in the slightest—it’s the public nature of the review. One simply cannot hide from the
Times
, it is ubiquitous in this part of the world, and a bad review means primarily that one’s friends debate whether to offer condolences or to say absolutely nothing at all; in any case, one becomes a burden—temporarily. But so long as I live in Princeton I will have to accommodate myself to this extraordinarily public fishbowl translucent life, and try to make myself genuinely (genuinely!) happy about “good” re
views. For the bad will come soon enough, never fear. One must make an effort to enjoy the good….

[…]

July 14, 1980.
…Finished “My Warszawa.” Revised pages, etc. Am fairly pleased with it. I think. Many notes left out….

…Have been thinking not of
Angel of Light
(which I seem to have abandoned) but of a new long dense multi-layered novel about five or six sisters…in texture and freedom of movement rather like
Bellefleur
*
(whose gravityless air I miss so badly!)…perhaps it will be “historical” as well. I envision these young women growing into young women at different paces. Different rhythms. Last night I awoke from a complicated dream that seemed to be about this novel…though “novel” is a rather solid noun to affix to something so nebulous. I imagined the most beautiful of the sisters being punished for her vanity (or her beauty?) by a skin rash that begins with a single coin-sized scaly itch. Which she scratches half-consciously and heedlessly. Until of course it spreads. Even then she doesn’t take alarm until it spreads to her arms and neck and finally to her face. (Such is her indifference to the private aspect of herself.)…But I envision too a “return” for her, normality & even more…. Does any of this make sense?????

…A blazing white mist. Which I can’t penetrate.

…Midsummer, and I shall work on a new story (the poet & his mistress/secretary/bookkeeper) and perhaps after that “My Budapest” which exists, in a rudimentary form, in my blue journal.
^†
And then back to
Angel of Light
. This new long novel has no name…no focus…I will come to think of it as a certain gravitational pull (like
Bellefleur:
when did I come upon the name Bellefleur?)…rather than a coherent idea. A texture of language, a slanting of light,
different from, other than, foreign
.

[…]

July 15, 1980.
[…] Self-analysis, self-scrutiny. Seeing ourselves “objectively.” The public person enjoys (enjoys!) the opportunity of “seeing” himself in so many mirrors, in so many distorting mirrors, that the selves available are positively staggering. And if I sit and meditate upon myself, my emotions, my motives, I seem to see right through the person I inhabit—I mean the personality. One might well inquire, Is this wise? One might well inquire, Is this the best possible use of time?

For instance, I receive a letter from X. A literary friend. He isn’t, I am fairly certain, being altogether honest with me about something—and the matter is minor. He mentions “love.” He states again that he thinks I am so very, very talented—the foremost writer of the 70’s, in fact. All this would be flattering except it’s absolutely hollow, and false, and self-serving (the self it serves isn’t my own, unfortunately); and the nonsense about “love”—! Cheap, sentimental, absolutely absurd. The most embarrassing sort of 60’s rot….

Now the hypocrisy of the letter angers me, and in my mind I write letters in response. Five or six versions. The essence of the activity is to allow myself to know that I know X’s game—and I am cautious enough (I think it is caution, perhaps it is cowardice or cynicism) to keep the letters to myself, not to trouble writing even one of them and mailing it out. My motives are fairly clear. 1) I don’t want to make an enemy—another enemy! 2) X seems unconscious of his hypocrisy, and seems to mean the pap about

“love”—to criticize him for paying homage to love might be cruel, and in any case would inspire his immediate hatred; 3) he is trying to manipulate me for future use, and I suppose I can’t blame him—
Bellefleur
just being launched, my position in the American Academy-Institute, my reviewing work, etc. 4) I might be mistaken about the letter—it sounds hollow because he wrote it quickly, he really doesn’t think I would believe he loves me, etc…. and on and on. I see myself as reacting to another’s dishonesty as if every transaction I make, and have made,
has in fact been honest
. As if everyone with whom I deal is absolutely honest too.

The problem, the moral problem: Do I refuse to reply to his letter for the reasons above, or because I halfway imagine that I want to manipulate
him—at least, sometime in the future? Do I suspect that he might be of “use” to me too? (Admittedly I can be of more use to him than he can to me, but my unconscious machinery can’t grasp such subtleties.) So I am confronted with the pebble-sized ethical issue…should I reply to his letter in precisely the same terms in which I am recording my thoughts (my relentless and systematic thoughts!) in this private journal; or should I do nothing.

By doing nothing I am possibly being dishonest myself. To myself. Because I am fairly certain of X’s dishonesty, and really should not allow him to think that he can impose it on me. On the other hand, by replying to his letter…I am falling into a kind of trap. He will reply, defending himself; I will then wonder if I should reply again, or break off the correspondence. X’s next letter won’t be so friendly, and will certainly not blather about love…. So my feelings will be hurt, as well as my sense of reality. So I will write a letter in defense of my position. And he will then reply. And….

No, it’s obvious: I can’t reply. The friendship—a very remote one, in fact we have never met—must end.

So X will contrive a myth about Joyce Carol Oates, suitable to his (dis)honesty. And this myth will circulate in the world. And there isn’t a thing—not a thing—I can do to stop it, or modify it.

…And so on, and so forth. These are the kinds of thoughts I exercise in “meditation,” “self-analysis.” I do it daily, but I rarely record it, not because I don’t believe in scrutinizing the self more or less fastidiously, but because I don’t believe in recording it. For when I come to my decision (“The friendship must end”) that is the reasoned decision, and already it slips into the past (“The friendship has ended”—when X wrote his letter), and that is that….

…Nietzsche’s merciless analysis of self & others, a suicidal procedure emotionally—for him. Because he hadn’t the ballast one needs to make such an analysis. I suspect I know just what the ballast is, though I arrived at it more or less accidentally, that is to say naturally: normal love, normal life, normal work or anyway a normal dependence upon work, a
normal enough role in a normal enough community. Without this ballast one simply can’t risk deep explorations, staring into abysses, courting madness. […] My strategy must be: if I lose this ballast of presumed “normality” I must stop writing about the sorts of things I have been writing about for the past twenty years. Because the past twenty years…and more…have seen me defined and loved and cherished and (yes) overvalued…first by my parents and Grandmother Woodside, then by Ray. I moved without any period of adjustment from being a “daughter” and “granddaughter” to being a “beloved” and “wife.” I might not have known who I was, but I knew what I was: the role was there, and is still here, some of it internalized. With my roots so deep I can risk all sorts of high winds, lightning storms…. If something happens, however, I will have to retreat.

I only hope I understand this utterly obvious fact—when the time comes.

July 21, 1980.
…The great relief & excitement of having begun work on
Angel of Light
again, after so many weeks. Immersed now in Maurie and his infatuation with Isabel…which he doesn’t quite grasp as a stratagem…not only another “way” of loving Nick but an actual means of reaching Nick. Working on “Tower Rock” and “After the Storm.”

[…]

…Extremely hot here yesterday, 97 degrees during the afternoon. The main rooms of the house are air-conditioned, but not this study. Still, I could work in bouts…the heat wasn’t absolutely crippling […] turned with great excitement to
Angel of Light
about which I’ve been thinking for so many weeks, with a sort of yearning melancholy. Rereading the Mt. Dunvegan Island section I felt that I liked the language very much, its queer dipping elusive rhythms, but I can also see—as I had suspected—that the novel isn’t going to be very readable, let alone (to use John Gardner’s term) “semi-popular.”