The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The doctor who prescribed barbiturates for me, when I couldn’t sleep, a few years ago: really a criminal. Enormous dosage, so powerful I could barely wake for hours the following day, and did he care?—did he know?—a routine examination that consisted of a few questions, a moment of listening to my heart, or seeming to listen—and nothing more. Took the sleeping pills for a few months, and one day threw them into the toilet—an instinct for survival—tremendous relief afterward, feeling I had escaped something dangerous. Hence my knowledge of, sympathy for, those who are addicted…but my ultimate disapproval…for this sort of thing is truly suicidal, as those of us who’ve been there can testify. The psyche can’t be manipulated, dreams should not be altered, consciousness itself not altered any more than is necessary….

  Odd meetings with Stanley Elkin, who advertised his various illnesses, physical and mental, transposing them into jokes—and a very funny man is he!—irresistibly funny—while I, at my lowest point then, tried to hide it all, assuming no one would be interested in my troubles—as of course they would not be—unless such troubles could be transposed into anecdotes or jokes, thereby socially acceptable. Antithetical beings, no two people more unalike, all the more surprising then that we should still be in contact—in a manner of speaking—years afterward. Memory of Stanley in that hideously depressing semi-detached house they rented, in Pimlico (of all places, so difficult to get to): parodying O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, then playing in London with Sir Laurence Olivier, by falling repeatedly to the dirty carpet, moaning in self-pity—while everyone laughed delightedly—he is awfully funny. And yet wasn’t he parodying himself?—a part of the humor being our awareness of his mortal troubles, and his refusal to take them seriously. Except of course they were uppermost in his mind. Afterward, saying good-bye, he made Bob Coover laugh almost hysterically by acting out the triumph he, Stanley, would have when Coover was dead and buried—in a wheelchair by then (Stanley had, or has, multiple sclerosis—or so people said), he would gleefully ride back and forth over Bob’s grave—all very funny, hilarious at the time, particularly because everyone had been drinking. I certainly thought it was funny at the time. Afterward, less so: but who cares about “afterward”? The essence of a party, the essence of humor, is its livingness at the moment—it really shouldn’t be examined afterward—like love?—and yet one can’t help but remember the odd hysterical pathos of that humor, famously “gallows humor,” where mortality is ridiculed and jeered and made the subject of hilarity…. But to live with a man like that, how is it possible????? The solace of alcohol, for some people. The danger of seeming or actually being priggish, for those who dislike it. S. resented me more for not drinking than for being a more widely-read writer than he…“widely-read” a kind of exaggeration, in my case, but meaningful to him.

  Immense gratitude, returning to North America! To this house, this neighborhood, this job, these colleagues and friends! That sabbatical year was precious, richly enjoyed, and yet “one would not wish it longer”—not by one day.

  December 12, 1974. Lovely quiet days. Monday at the University, several days at home correcting exams; reading; working on the novel. Now after some difficult passages…the odd desire to write allegory before the novel is actually begun (when everything seems so powerfully clear) and the necessity to expand, give voice to, all that is not simple…. Despite my admiration for writers like Hawthorne and Flannery O’Connor and (even) Kafka, how were they able to resist giving life and therefore complexity to their people…? There is something so blunt, savage, cruel, otherworldly in the worst sense of that word, about the willfulness of allegory. Without tenderness there can be no actual violence, without violence no possibility of tenderness.

  Last Friday, various interesting conversations. My awareness of the differences between people, the pressures that certain environments make upon personalities—and not upon others. My friend J. is a “Detroiter” as well as an “American,” as well as an individual of a unique sort; my friend G. an ex-Chicagoan, now a Canadian citizen;* but I seem rootless, homeless, without specific identity. Perhaps it is the rural background…nature being a kind of universal, in contrast to the important specifics of cities. There, neighborhoods are very important…each downtown is unique…landmarks significant, acquiring (as in Lockport, for me†) a certain semi-mystic importance, deeply imprinted upon the imagination. The stores one drifted in and out of, in early adolescence!…the window-shopping, daydreaming, the myriad insatiable observations…. But the country is the country. Nature is nature. Driving north into Washington, the other summer, I was struck by something familiar in the landscape, though I had never been there before…. It is not true, of course, that “nature” is simply “nature”; regions vary, atmospheres vary, Northern California is another world compared to Southern California…but there is a certain oneness, a certain calm acceptance…. Nationalities mean little, “patriotism” is a difficult thing, governments remote, abstract, faintly ludicrous (especially in our time). Nature is victorious, an absolute without melodrama, a constant; the nature of our pasts is always accessible in the present, a source of much consolation. Therefore it is difficult for me to participate in passionate conversations about “national identity.”…I halfway think people talk of such things because they have nothing else to talk about. Then they argue, then they make their telling points, then they depart….

  A surprising conversation with R. I asked him if he thought very often of death—of life-and-death—philosophical matters—the odd fact of human personality and consciousness—these teasing things I am haunted by constantly, every hour of my life. His reply was simple: “No.”

  The lakers and ocean freighters on the river are now decorated for Christmas. Some have Christmas trees illuminated, others fanciful arrangements of colored lights, mainly red and green. Strange silent boats going by in the night…really beautiful, mysterious…a very nice custom.

  We are very detached, though, from Christmas and the holiday season. No connection whatsoever. Gifts?—we don’t exchange them. Very few cards sent out. No ceremonies between us—none of a formal nature, anyway. Puzzling, that others should have time for such things, year after repetitive year….

  December 29, 1974. No entries for many days; cannot guess why. Much happens and continues to happen, in this odd end-of-year acceleration when one’s previous life seems somehow brought back, observed dispassionately, marveled at. A year ago I experienced vivid and unforgettable New Year’s Eve dreams, and am hoping to elude them this year. The psyche can be overpowering, can draw one’s concentration away from matters that must be attended to (like planning for classes, running a household), induce a curious melancholy and yearning for the transcendent which daily life cannot satisfy….

  Went out to dinner with Jerry Mazzaro,* talked of poetry and difficulties at Buffalo (too many temperamental people in too small an area) and love of the process of writing, which really can’t be spoken of, can only be experienced. He said Anne Sexton had died drinking champagne, a brick on the accelerator of her car. Truth? Rumor? Since rumors are told about me, I can’t always believe what I hear about other people. Death is a fact…the means of death never.

  Superb Indian dinner at the home of the Atkinsons, Colin and Jo. Easy conversation, little strain, their new house near the University comfortable and solid. Sense of alternative lives, other lives. Personalities that are compatible but not predictable. Ongoing drama. Growing older, one marvels at the sheer diversity of us! We must make a spectacle, indeed. Colin and Jo told us an extraordinary tall tale about me…lifted and embroidered from them, evidently, Nadine’s assault upon Jules† attributed to me (that is, a threatened assault). Unfortunately my life can’t hope to compete with my fiction.

  Party at the McNamaras’, quite large. Enjoyable, though tiring. One’s spirit is diminished and must be then built up again. The art of self-effacement. Listening, observing, studying. Implicit understandings between some of us, now “old” fri
ends, unspoken exchanges, glances, etc. The miracle of relationships. Why are some of us intimate friends and others merely friends and still others acquaintances…? Why do some people respond to one another, so spontaneously, warmly?…and to others not at all? “Social life” a mysterious thing. One has an instinctive yearning for it, yet most of the time it is unsatisfying. Only friendship, only relationships over an extended period of time, have meaning. Even then, so much of our lives are eclipsed, secret, how can we know each other easily…? Perhaps the dream-selves somehow keep pace. I do dream about friends, and perhaps they are the people themselves and not symbols or imaged emotions…. In any case it is out of our control. We grow into friendships like plants, our roots mingle, a slower and less dramatic form of love. The growth is something that happens and can’t be forced, but it can be encouraged. Then again, sometimes it can’t.

  One more party in 1974, New Year’s. The year 1975 seems unreal, still. Am planning ahead into 1976 already. What an infinity of time! The Assassins giving me technical difficulty; fitting pieces of a puzzle together without using force. A novel that won’t be published for a long time, if ever…yet far more crucial to me, at the moment, than anything that will appear in the near future.

  No interest in stories, still. Is the story form too brief, too thin, for what I feel compelled to do? No poetry either…. The spirit moves where it will.

  * Oates’s story “Black Eucharist,” which she never collected, was published in the fall 1977 issue of a short-lived literary magazine called Canto.

  * “The Spectre” appeared in the summer 1974 issue of New Letters magazine and was collected in Oates’s 1978 volume Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money (Louisiana State University Press).

  † Oates’s poem “Seizure” had appeared in the fall 1973 issue of Ohio Review and would be included in her 1975 volume The Fabulous Beasts (Louisiana State University Press).

  ‡ Roth’s novel My Life As a Man appeared in 1974.

  * Gene McNamara, Alistair MacLeod, and Colin Atkinson were all English department colleagues of Oates’s at the University of Windsor.

  † Elizabeth Graham and Kay Smith were close Detroit-area friends during Oates’s years teaching at the University of Detroit and the University of Windsor.

  ‡ Oates’s story “Paradise: A Post-Love Story,” loosely based on her relationship with A.K., was published in the summer 1976 issue of Shenandoah. Death-Festival is the journal’s first mention of the novel that would later be retitled The Assassins and published in 1975 by Vanguard.

  § The Petrie family—Andrew, Yvonne, Hugh, and Stephen—were the focus of Oates’s new novel in progress.

  ¶ Quentin Bell’s biography of his aunt, British novelist Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), had recently appeared.

  * A prolific author, Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist and Harvard professor.

  * Elizabeth Janeway (1913–2005) was a feminist social critic and novelist.

  * Jules Wendall in Oates’s novel them (1969) becomes involved in the Detroit riots of 1967 and shoots a policeman.

  * Oates’s novel Wonderland (1971) is replete with imagery of food and eating. In one macabre scene, a young intern broils a cadaver’s uterus and eats it.

  * The Goddess and Other Women, a collection of short stories, and New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature, a book of essays, were both published by Vanguard.

  † Like Elizabeth Graham and Kay Smith, Marjorie Levin was one of Oates’s nonacademic Detroit-area friends.

  * Marian Engel’s positive review, “Women Also Have Dark Hearts,” appeared in the November 2, 1974, issue of the New York Times Book Review.

  * Oates’s story “Poetics 105,” which she has never collected, appeared in the fall 1977 issue of Descant.

  * D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover had originally been published in 1928.

  * This “earlier” journal, predating 1973, no longer exists.

  * The American novelists John Gardner (1933–82), Robert Coover (b. 1932), and Stanley Elkin (1930–95) were among the writers in Oates’s circle of friendly acquaintances during her sabbatical year in London.

  * “J.” and “G.” were her University of Windsor English department colleagues John Ditsky and Gene McNamara.

  † Oates had been born in Lockport, New York, and grew up a few miles from that city.

  * Jerome Mazzaro (b. 1934 ), American poet and critic, taught at SUNY-Buffalo.

  † In them, Jules Wendall’s emotionally disturbed girlfriend, Nadine, shoots him in the chest.

  three: 1975

  The challenge is to wed the naturalistic and the symbolic, the realistic and the abstract, the utterly convincing story and the parable…that is, to bring together the psychological and the mythic in one character at all moments…and to wed time and eternity in a seamless whole.

  The beginning of 1975 finds Oates absorbed in completing her longest novel to date, The Assassins. What is particularly interesting about the journal at this point is her awareness that she now writes in a “really new way” and that, as she notes on January 12, “Now writing a novel is a process. It is an experience that evolves. The novel is its own experience and its subject is always the evolving of consciousness.” Though Oates continued with her occasional book reviewing, her immersion in The Assassins precluded any other writing until she completed the novel in mid-February.

  Characteristically, she plunged immediately thereafter into new projects: a series of short stories that dealt in part with “spiritualism” and would be collected in her 1977 volume, Night-Side; and notes for her next novel, Childwold (1976). She even had the notion that she would like to write a biography, though nothing ever came of this idea.

  In the spring, Oates and Smith took a long car trip from Windsor to Washington, D.C., where she read at the Library of Congress; to New York City; and to various points in New York state, including her parents’ home in Millersport. The social, gregarious side of her personality always came out during such trips, and in addition to various writing-related public appearances she was able to meet fellow authors such as the Texas-born novelist William Goyen and the celebrated playwright Lillian Hellman.

  Another trip, this one lasting three weeks, came in July, when the couple traveled to various Canadian cities—Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City—and other points in Maine, Massachusetts, and New York. Oates noted on July 27 that “I crave travel,” again showing her intense enjoyment of these breaks from her rigorous solitude and writing discipline. In a sense, however, she was always writing, even while on the road, continuing to take notes for the new novel and for short stories. Childwold (she “found” the title during her travels, the word posted somewhere along a mountain road), she knew, was to be one of her most experimental and least commercially viable projects. It would be, as she notes here, a novel in the form of a “prose poem,” though she would try to “disguise it as a novel,” and certainly her publisher, Vanguard, by the time of publication, shied away from the idea of mentioning that the novel was a prose poem.

  The dogged intensity with which Oates worked at a novel, once it came together in her mind, is illustrated by an unusual gap in the journal between August 9 and September 28. During this roughly six-week period she wrote over 300 pages, essentially completing and revising the novel to her satisfaction. She found the experience “liberating” in its wedding of naturalistic detail (the book is set in her native area of upstate New York) and a symbolic mode of expression, reflected through the voices of five distinct characters. (A working title for the novel had been Broken Reflections.)

  With the novel completed, she turned as usual back to short stories (including some published under a pseudonym, “Rae-Jolene Smith”) and book reviews; and, as always, that fall she was also absorbed in teaching, an element of her life to which the journal frequently pays eloquent homage.

  January 4, 1975. […] Reading with amusement a colleague’s poems about his past love affairs, s
ome nine of them, or so he hints; thinking at once of other poets’ similar poems […]; wondering if the poet as poet speaks here, not the poet as human being, still less as man…must they compete, and this is simply a gesture of brotherhood? (“I too have had these affairs…I too am a poet”). Then reading and being astonished by the revelations of a much younger poet (born in 1943!—and these other poor old boys born many years before) complete with photographs of his lovely, in fact remarkable girls, several of whom were or are models, actresses, of moderate renown…one of them dead, even, at the age of twenty-five, evidently suicide. Does one value the “revelations” when they involve genuinely striking people, and feel only slightly embarrassed amusement when they involve quite ordinary people with ordinary domestic problems and ailments of various unromantic kinds…not to mention delinquent taxes, and small neurotic anxieties? If so, one is more of an elitist than one would like to admit…. To respect someone’s love poems, one must not meet the person to whom they were originally written. The aesthetic impulse seems to work best at a distance…perhaps we require formality, coolness, impersonality…if we are to believe in violent passion.