In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews

by Joyce Carol Oates

  On the evening of March 4, I’d received the 1970 National Book Award for my novel them at a gala celebration; this photograph was taken by the distinguished photographer Jack Robinson on the morning of March 6, nearing 9:30 A.M. Amid a flurry of interviews and photography sessions during my brief but distressingly crowded visit to New York this image is the single one to remain dramatically imprinted in my memory. What is evoked in the portrait for me is a perverse sort of nostalgia: the recollection of an era of peril, beginning with the tragic assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and continuing through a dazed, near-anarchic decade of assassinations (Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., 1968) and “race” riots in American cities (as in Detroit, in July 1967, when we were living in that beleaguered city) through the end of the bloody, protracted and exhausting Vietnam War in 1973. It is an era difficult to describe to those who didn’t live through it when paranoia flourished, and with justification; drug use became as promiscuous and commonplace as smoking cigarettes; and isolated acts of terrorism, bombs on college campuses, for instance, or detonated at the Pentagon, were purely homegrown, “American-revolutionary-radical” and not foreign. For that morning, after a night of fitful sleep on a very hard (horse-hair?) mattress in a guest room in a distinguished old Central Park West apartment building listening to the nighttime sounds of the great city (if sirens were neon-red traceries in the sky, how like a cat’s cradle the sky above New York City would look!), as I sat stiff and self-conscious, trying not to blink in the glaring lights, trying, as the photographer gently urged me, to “relax,” there came suddenly, from somewhere close by, a deafening explosion. Windows rattled, the floor, walls, ceiling of the studio shook.

  Abruptly, the photography session ended.

  Perhaps at the instant this image was “captured” on film: the instant when the private and inward is waylaid, appropriated and redefined by an act of violence.

  In that instant, you feel a sick, animal fear. As we’d felt, over a period of hours, even days, at the time of the “civil unrest” in Detroit, arson fires, looting, street violence and gunfire less than three blocks from our house in a residential neighborhood near the University of Detroit, where I taught at the time. At such moments of peril you think This can’t be happening! This can’t be happening to me. And if you are lucky, it isn’t.

  We staggered out of the photographer’s studio, out of the brownstone in the West Village and onto the sidewalk where already the air was smoky and gritty. We were dazed, panicky. With such stunning abruptness the intimate moment of art had ended and had been replaced by this brute and utterly perplexing reality. Around us were frightened pedestrians, stalled traffic, a cacophony of horns and sirens. No one had any idea what had happened: an exploding boiler? Gas line? A bomb?

  A block or so away, flames shot upward from what appeared to be a brownstone town house. It would turn out to be an elegant nineteenth-century house with a Greek-revival facade, the boyhood home of the poet James Merrill.

  Later, it would be revealed that the terrible explosion had been inadvertently caused by an amateur bombmaker who’d triggered a timer on a homemade “antipersonnel” bomb being assembled in the basement of the house at 18 West Eleventh Street, by two zealot members of the radical antiwar group Weatherman, with the intention of setting off the bomb at a dance at the Fort Dix, New Jersey, army base. (“Antipersonnel” is a particularly nasty kind of bomb, tightly packed with screws and nails, intended to dismember human targets.) The bomb fortuitously detonated that morning killed three individuals, two men and a woman named Diana Oughton, a former debutante and Bryn Mawr graduate, whose body was grotesquely dismembered in the blast; fleeing from the burning house, naked, on foot were two female Weathermen, one of them Kathy Boudin, later to acquire notoriety of her own.

  That season of peril. The sour, sick dregs of 1960s counterculture idealism. In such rocky soil the seeds of nostalgia yet grow.

  We left New York the next day. We returned to Windsor, Ontario. We lived there in a white-brick house with plate glass walls overlooking the Detroit River. Living in Ontario during the ongoing crisis of the Vietnam War, in a foreign country with the advantage of hardly seeming foreign, in a city that is, by a geographical quirk, south of Detroit, I would stare out the window of my study at the fast-flowing, choppy and often leaden-colored river and would remember, with a pang of loss, how curious and fleeting is the intimacy between photographer and “subject,” how abruptly it can end; and the image that remains can be both timeless and time-bound, a memory of nightmare crystallized in art.

  THE MYTH OF THE “AMERICAN IDEA”: 2007

  How heartily sick the world has grown, in the first seven years of the twenty-first century, of the “American idea”! Speak with any non-American, travel to any foreign country, the consensus is: the “American idea” has become a cruel joke, a blustery and bellicose bodybuilder luridly bulked up on steroids, consequently low on natural testosterone, deranged and myopic, dangerous. In 1923 D. H. Lawrence remarked that the essential American soul is “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer” and except for “stoic” this description is as accurate in 2007 as it was more than eighty years ago when Lawrence’s brilliantly unorthodox Studies in Classic American Literature was published. How would Lawrence react to the quasi-mystical, shamefully self-aggrandizing “American idea”? Very likely, along these lines:

  Freedom…? The land of the free! This is the land of the free! Why, if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will lynch me, and that’s my freedom. Free? Why, I have never lived in any country where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen. Because, as I say, they are free to lynch him the moment he shows that he is not one of them. [D. H. Lawrence, “The Spirit of Place”]

  (If not “lynch” precisely how about “crucify in the media”? The ravenous tabloid press, tabloid TV and ever more ominously “mainstream” media have become the lynch mob of contemporary times, pummeling those guilty of the most innocuous of blunders with the ferocity with which they pummel outright criminals.)

  What is most questionable about the “American idea”—indeed, most dangerous—is its very formulation: that there is a distinctly “American idea” in contrast to Canadian, British, French, Chinese, Icelandic, Estonian, or mere human “ideas.” Our unexamined belief in American exceptionalism has allowed us to imagine ourselves above anything so constrictive as international law. American exceptionalism makes our imperialism altruistic, our plundering of the world’s resources a healthy exercise of capitalism and “free trade.” From childhood we are indoctrinated with the propaganda that, as Americans, we are superior to other nations; our way of life, a mass-market “democracy” manipulated by lobbyists, is superior to all other forms of government; no matter how frivolous and debased, our American culture is the supreme culture, as our language is the supreme language; our most blatantly imperialistic and cynical political goals are always idealistic, while the goals of other nations are transparently opportunistic. Perhaps the most pernicious of American ideas is the revered “My country right or wrong” with its thinly veiled threat of punishment against those who hesitate to participate in a criminal patriotism. The myth of American exceptionalism begins with the revolt of the colonies against the British crown. In 1776, what a thrilling, exhilarating “American idea”! But in the first decade of the twenty-first century, in a vastly altered world, and considering the higher degree of civilization embodied by Canada, that waged no war against the British—that country’s reluctance to rush into war, its disinclination to celebrate the violence of the frontier, and to display itself as exceptional—it might be a timely American idea to examine our very origins.

  “WHY IS HUMANISM NOT THE PREEMINENT BELIEF OF HUMANKIND?” ADDRESS UPON RECEIVING THE 2007 HUMANIST OF THE YEAR AWARD

  Humanism—like “the humanities”—indeed, all of the arts—has sometimes seemed, amid the turbulence of history, a frail vessel bearing us onward along a treacherous stream, a
nd yet, the ideal of humanism prevails: a faith in reason, in the strategies of skepticism and doubt, a refusal to concede to “traditional” customs, religious convictions, and superstitions. Yesterday, in San Francisco, interviewed on Michael Kresnick’s popular Book Forum, which is a call-in radio show, I inadvertently aroused the anger of a number of individuals who called in to protest my remark in passing that I did not believe in “evil”—that I thought that “evil” is a theological term, and not adequate to explain, nor even to suggest, psychological, social, and political complexities. When we label someone as “evil” we are implicitly identifying ourselves as “good.” The issue was Islamic suicide bombers who are surely motivated by political passions and so to call them merely “evil” is to fail to understand the phenomenon of terrorism. Though I said repeatedly that I wasn’t defending terrorism, I was questioning the terms in which it was being discussed, it seemed to make no difference: my critics remained angry, and unplacated. There would seem to be a powerful need in many—most?—people to believe in literal “evil”—“good”—“God”—“Heaven”—“Hell.” Terms we might interpret as metaphorical have acquired an eerie Platonic “realism.”

  Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of human-kind? We must imagine our distant ancestors discovering death—baffled and terrified by death—and needing to ascribe to this natural phenomenon a supernatural explanation. As T. S. Eliot observed, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality”—especially, humankind can’t bear the crushing evidence of a reality that limits human delusions of immortality and omniscience. A primitive fear of the unknown—of death—a disbelief that “this can’t be all there is” prevails in all of us, tempting us to believe in a deity that will guarantee not only our immortality but our worth; and will unite us with “loved ones” in the afterlife, as in the country and western classic “May the Circle Be Unbroken” (“in the sky, Lord, in the sky”). As a novelist I tend to be sympathetic with persons who are religious, though I can’t share in their convictions; it has always been something of a mystery to me, that intelligent, educated men and women—as well as the uneducated—can “have faith” in an invisible and non-existent God. One hundred years ago a gathering like this would have consisted of a majority of individuals who believed in the “perfectability” of mankind. In the wake of Charles Darwin’s revolutionary work, scientists and educators like the distinguished T. H. Huxley believed in both biological and social/moral evolution. The optimism of the turn of the century—the previous century—is expressed in H. G. Wells’s youthful, Utopian work; though there is a check to that work in Wells’s brilliantly conceived and executed “scientific romances” (The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The War of the Worlds). By 1920, a more cautious note is sounded in Wells’s monumental The Outline of History: “Human history becomes a race between education and catastrophe.” By 1945, in The Mind at the End of Its Tether, the former Utopianist was predicting the destruction of human civilization, in a tone comparable to that of Sigmund Freud in his late, melancholy essays The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents. In fifty years, in the wake of not one but two devastating world wars, the Holocaust and the revelation of the Nazis’ genocidal agenda against Jews, the “perfectability of mankind” would seem to have been turned inside-out. And yet, humankind—and humanism—prevails. And in succeeding generations, I would like to predict that humanism—a secular ethical analogue to the old religions of tradition—will be the preeminent belief of humankind.

  IN THE ABSENCE OF MENTORS/MONSTERS: NOTES ON WRITERLY INFLUENCES

  How solitary I’ve always felt, in my writing life. Unlike nearly all my writer friends, especially my poet friends, I never really had a “mentor”—never anyone to whom I might show my work in progress in anything approaching an ongoing, still less an intimate or “profound,” relationship.

  Even during my marriage of many years—which ended in February 2008 with the sudden death of my husband, Raymond Smith—my writing occupied another compartment of my life, apart from my married life. I am uneasy when people close to me read my writing—my fiction—as if I were intruding on their sense of me, which I would not wish to violate; I think that the life of the artist can be detached from the life of the “art”—no one is comfortable when others perceive, or believe they can perceive, the wellsprings of their “art” amid the unremarkable detritus of life.

  Since my husband was an editor and publisher, overwhelmed with reading, assessing, annotating and editing manuscripts to be published in The Ontario Review or by Ontario Review Press, I was reluctant to take up his time with yet more writerly projects of my own. I did ask him to read my nonfiction essays and reviews for such publications as the New York Review of Books—which, in any case, as an avid reader of that publication, he would have read when they were printed.

  Rarely did he read my fiction. Not in progress or after publication.

  Maybe this was a mistake. I am willing to concede that much in my life has been mistaken—and yet: what is the alternative, superior life I might have led? Is there such a Platonic fantasy?

  I haven’t had significant mentors in my writing life, nor have I had “monsters”—but I have had, and have now, fascinating writer friends. It’s altogether likely that these writer friends have influenced me in ways too subtle and diffuse to examine except anecdotally.

  The Rival. The day of Vladimir Nabokov’s death—July 2, 1977—is firmly fixed in my memory, for on the following day Donald Barthelme said casually to me, with a puckish lift of his upper lip and what in non-Barthelmian prose might be described as a twinkle of the stone-colored eye behind wire-rimmed glasses: “Happy? Nabokov died yesterday, we all move up a notch.”

  (And how did I respond to this? Probably with a startled or an embarrassed smile, and a murmur of mild disapprobation. Oh Don, you don’t mean that—do you?)

  Well, no! Don was just kidding.

  Well, yes. What is kidding but deadly serious?

  We were in an Italian restaurant within a few blocks of Donald’s apartment at 113 West Eleventh Street in New York City. We were having a late lunch after drinks at the apartment with Donald’s wife, Marian—Don’s second wife, young, blond, attractive and, it seemed, warily in love with this complex, difficult, elliptical man, who behaved much more naturally—graciously—with my husband than with me, with whom he spoke in a manner that was jocular and subtly needling, edged with irony, sarcasm. As if Don didn’t know what to make of me—at least in person. This was the first time we’d met after a friendly/funny correspondence following a literary feud of sorts conducted in public, in the pages of the New York Times Book Review (me) and Newsweek (Donald)—a disagreement of the kind writers had in the 1970s, or perhaps have had through the centuries, regarding the “moral”/“amoral” nature of literature. (The following year, John Gardner would publish his controversial polemic On Moral Fiction, praised in some quarters and condemned in others.) For the purposes of writerly combat “Joyce Carol Oates” weighed in on the side of moral seriousness; “Donald Barthelme” on the side of amoral playfulness. In an interview in the Times the Dada-inspired Barthelme had stated that “Fragments are the only form I trust,” which in retrospect sounds reasonable enough but, at the time, at the height of whatever literary issue was raging in whatever literary publications, struck me as dubious, or in any case a vulnerable position that might be questioned, if not attacked and repudiated. Subsequently, Donald “attacked” me in print, as one might have foreseen, and somehow it happened that we began writing to each other, and not long afterward we arranged to meet on one of my infrequent trips to New York, and so Donald Barthelme and I became not friends—for we saw each other too rarely for friendship, and when we did meet, Don was so clearly more at ease with my husband than with me—but “friendly acquaintances.”

  Perhaps Don thought of me as a “friendly rival”—it may have been that he thought of all writers, especially his contemporaries, as “rivals”—
in the combative, macho way of Stanley Elkin, John Gardner, Norman Mailer, and numerous (male) others. The notion of our being “competitors” in some sort of public contest made me feel very ill at ease, and so invariably I found myself murmuring something vaguely embarrassed and/or conciliatory, usually some variant of Oh Don, you don’t mean that—do you? with a hope of changing the subject.