The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates

by Joyce Carol Oates

  January 28, 1975. […] Vanguard is working on The Poisoned Kiss: Stories of Portugal. What a continuing headache that book gives me…! The writing of those stories was so odd, awkward, inexplicable…my embarrassment over them still very real…for though years have passed now I am now more unable to understand the book than I ever was. It is not a fraud; it is not a work of the imagination in my sense of the imagination; it is only itself, isolated, connected with nothing that precedes or follows. My interest is in American life, in the various strata of power…the interplay of personalities…the places at which temporal and eternal aspects of the self touch, wed, part, return.

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  All creative work is mysterious, not just my experience with Fernandes.* […] I remember writing and rewriting, abandoning the project and then returning, exasperated in a way that I rarely am with my own work. My own work!—that is what calls me, always. And Fernandes was not my own, was not I. Yet if not I, who?—for I can recognize certain cadences, now, certain preoccupations of my own, in his prose.

  Why inspiration comes, why inspiration disappears…who knows? Why do we love violently and then stop loving? Violence, violent emotions: always temporary? Or are they meant to be transformed into something more lasting, more intelligently human? A great deal of “inspiration” comes to me while I am teaching. I love the interplay of the students’ minds with my own, I love their unpredictability, their occasional outrageous questions—which show me how wildly different we all are, though ostensibly “united” in a classroom situation. […] A teacher, perhaps even more than a writer, requires humility…not the experience of being humbled, still less of being humiliated; simply humility. It keeps us all sane.

  February 1, 1975.…Dinner with friends last night, here; speaking of many things but quite incidentally of “spirits”…“spiritualism”…about which one supposes there is a sane, rationalist consensus of opinion…astonished to hear that our friends have had experience with such things, on a minor scale; are not committed to “believing” or “disbelieving.” Despite the Fernandes incident, or incidents, which belong to some years past and consequently to another, former self, there is something in me quite hesitant to want to believe in a continuity of life beyond the body…one life, one body at a time!…one life is quite enough to deal with.

  We seem to swing back and forth between believing that life has “meaning” and that it is “meaningless.” At times one belief is utterly convincing, at other times the other. Useless to attempt to reconcile the two certainties. Concepts are concepts, mere words…life is life, the present moment…trouble begins when we confuse the two. The idea of “death” is terrifying, but the “event” of death is neutral, not experienced as a concept, hence devoid of its emotional aura. However, it is quite legitimate to fear pain. It seems to me only intelligent, only human, to wish to be spared pain—whether “unnecessary” or “necessary” (and the concept of “necessary” pain is dubious), without a theological assumption of rewards for suffering and martyrdom, pain of any sort takes place in a vacuum and is a waste.[…]

  February 11, 1975.…Dinner the other evening with John Gardner and his wife. Hours of conversation. He imagines we are antithetical and perhaps we are…he believes that art can be “directed” far more than I allow; he believes one can more or less determine, program, what one will write. Perhaps. Possibly. It has not been my experience, however, that anything valuable (to me) has ever come out of a highly conscious, highly deliberate act of writing. He tells me to write a story about a family—in which things go well, for a change. “I,” Joyce Smith, Joyce who is his friend, Joyce the conscious being, would gladly write such a novel for the edification of all; but unfortunately, that self does not handle the writing, and will accept no assignments. Would that it might…. John seems not to understand or to allow that he understands (the two being quite different) that none of us “direct” our lives, really; our lives, our destinies, direct us. The ego is consciousness; the self or soul is consciousness and unconsciousness both, past and present and future in one essence. I know this, without being able to explain it. Explanations sound flat. All right: let there be no explanations. Let there be only the continuity of domestic miracles we call our lives…. If I could direct my writing, I would not be having such difficulties with The Assassins. One more chapter to go, the concluding chapter. […] I am angry—for the moment. It is 5:59 on a dark dreary February day and I must think about dinner soon (dinner? food? real life?) and I must think about reading Anne Sexton’s The Awful Rowing Toward God (which I am reviewing, I hope, for the New York Times)* but I am afraid to read the poems because I am afraid of missing her too much and more than that (to be honest) I am afraid of the death in the poetry, the death-knowledge…but I must also think about tomorrow’s classes, tomorrow my longest, fullest, most draining day (from 11 to approximately 6 P.M.)…the cat outside on my windowsill trying to get my attention so I will let her in…and then she will want to go out again, and again she will want to be let in…and all this makes me angry, the novel makes me angry, when I think of former selves of mine giving interviews and remarking that it is “easy” to write (which it never was, but I didn’t remember the difficulties) I am angry at those former selves and disown them and feel the exasperation other people say they feel for me, sometimes; I don’t blame them. And now it is 6:05. And nothing has changed—except the light outside—it’s almost dark, sub-zero weather, thankfully no wind from the river, my anger is abating but only (I know well) because I’m about to retreat for the night. I must record and remember these hours of befuddlement and rage and nullity.

  February 18, 1975. […] Reviewed the Sexton book today (The Awful Rowing Toward God); had reread her earlier books and was struck by the sameness in her poetry. From the very first poem in the very first book (To Bedlam and Partway Back) Anne Sexton knew her “subject” as well as she would ever know it. Powerful, sad, disturbing…occasionally witty…but so limited, so painfully limited! In The Awful Rowing Toward God there are echoes of Plath and Berryman and Roethke, sometimes direct borrowings (the maggots like “pearls,” an image of Plath’s; and “Ms. Dog,” rather like Berryman’s “Mr. Bones”), but I didn’t want to mention such things in the review. Anne Sexton had talked of having a posthumous book, thinking perhaps of Sylvia Plath’s achievement and acclaim, and so she has one—a considerable accomplishment in its own right, I believe, though why must one die to underscore the authenticity of one’s pain???? What Anne Sexton means by “God” I can’t imagine. Her “God” has masculine characteristics. I think it was simply death she wanted, and “God” was a word or concept she invented to use in place of the cruel word “death.” Surely God or the God-experience is available in everyday life, at any moment…it seems implausible to plunge into death in order to achieve “God.”

  February 20, 1975.…With the novel completed and mailed out, a wonderful sense of freedom and tranquility; sense that nothing needs to be done immediately. (In fact I have many obligations and chores…but they don’t seem to press at all upon me.) At the same time I am thinking about the next novel and about a possible short story, “A Middle-Class Education”*…so my interest in short fiction hasn’t exactly died out. […] An interesting day, very quiet. Ray went to the University and I was at home entirely alone for the first time in many, many weeks…. The experience of being alone in the house is, strangely, one I have so rarely now. I am never alone!…Amazing, to think of it. I am no longer alone for very long and haven’t been now for years. Of course I am “alone” at my desk, when working, as Ray is at his desk…but I am not alone in any larger sense. People who are lonely because they are “alone” would find it difficult to believe that the state of aloneness is in itself something precious…which married people surrender…at least people who are so closely, intensely married as Ray and I are. (We have not spent more than two or three nights apart from one another in over fourteen years.)…Alone for three hours this afternoon, the house absolutely silen
t, outside snow and vivid blue sky and sunshine, and my mind drifting free…realized I had not daydreamt in months…that I no longer “daydream” as I once did…. Consciously thought of the places of my childhood: tried to imagine in my mind’s eye the old farmhouse, my old room, the kitchen, living room, parents’ bedroom, the one-room schoolhouse and the cinder playground outside and the lane with the mud puddles and the house next door, where that unfortunate family lived…the father abusive, an alcoholic, the mother a factory-worker (he was unemployed)…five children…one of them, a girl, a year older than I and my best friend for years…. The memories sprang into my mind so vividly!…it was astonishing. I could “see” the room I’d had as a child…could see the old bureau, the linoleum floor, the shelves with glass figurines on them…could “see” these sights though I could not have recalled them consciously or intellectually. A remarkable experience. There is so much there in the mind…. As in Wonderland Jesse’s earlier memories are closer to him, more deeply imbedded, than anything he has experienced as an adult…so this must be true for us all…. The earliest sights, the earliest rooms and playgrounds and backyards and the houses of relatives (like my grandmother’s) seem to fix themselves in the brain far more powerfully than anything afterward. I think we deceive ourselves if we believe otherwise. In my case, I have no desire to return to childhood in any sense…would not want to relive even a day…have no sentimental yearnings along those lines; perhaps it is only unhappy childhoods that make one wish to re-live certain events?…in order to make them right the second time. I don’t know. I begin to see as I grow older how very fortunate I was in my early years: a mother, a father, a grandmother (my paternal grandmother) who loved me very much. And rural surroundings, beautiful surroundings…beautiful in their simple way…. This reservoir of visions or memories surrounds me, I suppose, at all times; the “unconscious” of my personal life buoys up the consciousness of everyday life, feeds it, and is rarely experienced. Very interesting, very!…fascinating. A kind of laboratory experiment today with my own consciousness the subject. Everyone is like this: of that I am certain. These early memories ought to be the subjects of deliberate, conscious meditations from time to time. It was like a journey and yet there was nothing odd or hallucinatory or even very emotional about it. Somehow I feel refreshed, strengthened….

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  March 23, 1975. […] Am reading, reading constantly, four or five books at a time, yet never much sense of urgency; am caught up at present with schoolwork; the new issue of the magazine is about completed; finished “The Sacrifice”* (difficult and quirky but let it stand: my last story, I hope, about an elderly man greeting his destiny); am thinking stray unformed exciting thoughts about another novel…. A family this time, perhaps five children, four of whom survive childhood and three of whom I follow into adulthood, † adventures in America, a rise from poverty or the background I know fairly well to middle-class stability and a kind of mystical affluence (which still surrounds me, despite the evident economic crisis), a curve back toward the beginning, a reconciliation of warring personalities, fusing-together of opposites, practical and visionary wisdoms brought together…but everything is vague at this point, only my anticipation, excitement, intense interest seems clear, unmistakable; but another novel so soon!…not part of my plans. Still, I won’t be ready to write it, not even the notes for it, for months. A long time. It arises so slowly, the characters form slowly, emerge slowly, slowly, one must only allow them their natural growth…. Already The Assassins seems to belong to another lifetime, another phase of personality. […]

  March 26, 1975. […] The novelist is an empiricist, an observer of facts…objective and subjective “reality”…he must guard against the demonic idea of imagining that he possesses or even can possess ultimate truth. In this way he is like a scientist, an ideal scientist. Humble, striving for what he does not yet know, wanting to discover it, not to impose a pre-imagined dogma upon reality. The novel as discovery. Fiction as constant discovery, revelation. The person who completes a novel is not the person who began it. Hence the joy of creation, the unpredictable changes, transformations, some minute and some major. As soon as the novelist stops observing, however, he becomes something else—an evangelist, a politician. A person with opinions…. The novelist must be on the side of life, willing to surrender his “beliefs,” even. Absolute truth is a chimera that draws us all but will destroy us should we ever succumb. Art especially is destroyed. Or, rather: set aside. When one believes he has the Truth, he is no longer an artist. When we finish a great work we should realize that we know less than we did before we began, in a sense; we are bewildered, confused, disturbed, filled with questions, ready to reread, unsettled by mystery.

  March 28, 1975. […] Since sending The Assassins out I’ve felt released and free and unusually happy, even for me; a sense of real completion, of having passed through and dealt with certain issues in my psychic life that were bound up with philosophical and social and historical paradoxes of our era. The novel does not solve anything; it is an experience that should not really point to anything beyond itself. The freedom of art, its ultimate ahistorical essence…. Began Carlos Baker’s Hemingway and read almost straight through, finished the book yesterday; felt drained, moved, even a little frightened. A far better book than Blotner’s Faulkner, since Blotner struggled with too much external detail and failed to get into the spirit of the man;* but it, too, could have relied upon quotations from Hemingway’s work, or from letters, that might have allowed the man to seem rather more intelligent than he did. He was intelligent, after all—a genius! Yet one comes away with the impression of a big bulky grizzled blustering half-mad egotist. Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf still seems to me the best biography I have read for years. How I would love to write a biography!…to immerse myself in the details of someone else’s life, for years, to live through and re-experience and possibly even give new life to that “other” human being…. But the subject would have to be perfect; would have to be sufficiently antithetical to my own personality, and not bound up with too much gossip or literary politics…. On the other hand, since I enjoy biographies, why write one? It’s enough simply to enjoy other people’s work without wanting to do similar work. Music and art are delightful, partly because I feel absolutely no inclination, no interest, not even a vague vicarious fantasy-interest, to do likewise. Whereas musicians, composers, artists must always feel a slight twinge of—of that indefinable impulse—that needling, abrupt, flurrying sensation of—of what?—of a desire to create?—not to imitate, not even to rival, but to—to make one’s own statement?—to outdo what has been done, in one’s own terms? The writer can’t really read other writing without feeling these dim sensations or urges, however engrossing the work is; I assume it must be the same thing, with musicians and composers and artists of any sort. The peace, therefore, of standing before a painting and looking at it. Or of listening to music. Peace, tranquility, a kind of submission to the spirit of the other artist, with no desire whatsoever to add anything of one’s own. (Criticism, professional criticism, must spring from such urges. The critic wants so badly to create!…to do something, anything!…but being unable, perhaps, to create original work, or being dissatisfied with what is possible, chooses instead to spin theories about other people’s work, to offer opinions in strategically obscure language, at times to destroy. Criticism can be monumentally creative, of course. At times highly artistic, highly personal. But it rarely relates to the work of art being assessed. It is an expression of the critic’s own subjectivity. Only when the critic is patiently descriptive, willing to set aside his or her “feelings” for a while, and attempt to describe the work objectively, is criticism legitimate. At other times it is illegitimate, but it can be very interesting nonetheless.)

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  April 3, 1975.…Sleet storm, blizzard, everything covered (again) with snow. Wind all night long. Bits of ice thrown against the windows, crackling tinkling noises, small explosions. Anothe
r Ice Age is upon us…. Yesterday, Wednesday, left me totally exhausted. Regular teaching and a two-hour session of such intensity, afterward I felt as if I were another person, or half a person, kept blinking and wondering if I could make it home. Luncheon at the University doesn’t interest me and there isn’t much time; so I don’t eat, don’t have any appetite; then this terrible exhaustion comes upon me, about 5:30, and at 6, when the seminar ends, I am what they call “wrung out.” No emotion attends this: no feeling of depression or dismay or even vexation. Just tiredness…. After dinner I feel better, usually much better. And I may do a little writing in the evening. But usually not: I just read, take notes. Which allows me to know that if I had a really demanding job, and worked like that five days a week, I probably wouldn’t write at all. The New York Times did a small article on women who worked very hard—“workaholics” was the catchy title—and I was included, but what I had said about University teaching was eliminated. But that’s half my life!…maybe more than half. If I had nothing else to do but write, I would write constantly and would be what is known as “prolific.” Which, of course, I wouldn’t want.

  Seem to be working, taking notes, on three different things. They are three different “visions,” and the style for each is uniquely its own. One is sardonic, satiric, quick-moving. Another is more “intellectual,” in the sense of dealing with ideas. Another, the one that interests me most, that I somehow can’t stop thinking of, is heavily detailed, slow-paced, a possible novel about the young girlhood of a woman rather like myself, with important fictional differences, of course…. Want very much to do a “family” novel again. Mother, brothers, sister, grandfather. Why is the father missing?…Because the family cannot be perfect: not in literature. “Happy families are…” as we know. And they teach us very little. Happiness is soon infuriating, in other people. It seems so self-congratulatory. It seems so shallow. “Happiness is only purchased by suffering,” says Dostoyevsky. Perhaps that is true. I don’t know. Dostoyevsky could not have known either, since “happiness” might have come to him whether or not he had suffered; whether or not he had known he had suffered. But it is an incontestable fact that “happiness” and its variants—contentment, well-being, optimism—are exasperating when they are pushed down our throats. When I read an interview with myself—which, I confess, I find it hard to do—for good reason—I’m annoyed at the statements I make as I would be annoyed at a stranger making them: who cares about normality, about things going right or well, about “Joyce Carol Oates” enjoying her writing? I should say that I find it torture and don’t know why I do it. Then I would sound more human. But that would be a lie: I’m as priggish as Conrad lately, and refuse to lie. (Even going through Customs with a $2.98 record.) So I can’t lie and the truth sounds wrong somehow. I don’t want to be concocting an “image” to set loose in the world, yet the reality disappoints or disturbs me, when I witness it from a distance. Always, though, the problem is solved by being forgotten. So I forget. I forget many things. I can’t take them seriously and I can’t take certain people seriously. But everything exists, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.