The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates

by Joyce Carol Oates

  September 28, 1975.…Have been revising, revising. Childwold, meant to be less than 200 pp. long, has grown now to approximately 300 pp. Some revisions are lavishly expansive, others are cuts, condensings. The “prose poem” form evolved into a novel of a kind with a plot, or at least with a certain forward movement in time; one can’t, after all, keep human beings from their lives…! It’s certainly less difficult than The Assassins, both to read and to write, and to rewrite. Thank God I have that novel behind me…. Like Wonderland, it seemed to hurt, to be hurting as it was done, the pain of it almost physical, something to be done cautiously, at as much distance as possible (though in the end no distance at all was possible). Childwold is liberating in the older, more modest sense of the word: it traces my own background, finds metaphors for certain events in my own life, fictionalizes a great deal in order to express what should be a simple truth. Not until midway into it did I realize the ultimate shape it would take—the liberating of one, the confinement of another (though Kasch’s fate is not truly confinement;* it is spiritual “liberation” of a mystical sort, which, at the moment, I don’t quite believe in—though perhaps I will again, someday: I seem to have thrown my lot in with history, for better or worse, and transcendence must come in flashes but must not be allowed to seem the goal—), an exchange of positions, a quite literal exchange of settings. Kasch buries himself in the country, Laney leaves the country to explore the world. That Laney is a form of myself is altogether obvious, and isn’t meant not to be, but I stressed her interest in art and biology rather than in literature, and that very little, very lightly, for fear of seeming too heavy-handed. What I did not want was “a portrait of the artist”…and, even so, the novel is longer than I wished. It could be 500 pages so easily; it could be 800 pages! But I wanted, this time, to write something small, scaled-down, subtle, even slight. A long prose poem. A dramatic prose poem. The form is so delightful, the demands so stimulating, I could happily begin again another “Childwold”…but must resist such temptations.

  …A story written and sent out under a pseudonym wound up being accepted by a distinguished literary journal that had just, a few days before, accepted one of “my” stories, sent to the editors by Blanche.† Had I known she sent them a story, I wouldn’t have sent them the other…! A coincidence; how interesting it would be if both appeared in the same issue.‡

  The fall semester is lively and stimulating and colorful—students from all over, many of them quite gifted: my Puerto Rican boy, Vietnam veteran, does experiments based on my stories, arresting variations on “my” fiction; it’s unnerving sometimes to read the stories since they echo my own and yet are quite different. Strange, very strange, to see one’s influence on others…to hear, from another source, one’s own voice. […]

  October 15, 1975.…Completed Childwold, revisions, page numberings, even the logo I hope to use (a yew branch);* but here it sits on my desk; for some reason I don’t want to mail it out. I could work and rework it endlessly. Every page could be expanded, every scene magnified, more bits introduced, tiny loving bits of description, meditation, mood, memory…. But it’s already far longer than I had wanted it to be, 321 pages where only 200, in fact less than 200, was desired. I had hoped for about 180. But these people must live, their voices must be given freedom….

  The musical nature of ordinary speech. So easy to miss it, to take people at face value. Though what they say might be banal, ugly, depressing, outrageous, the way in which they say it may be beautiful…. Let people talk and they express themselves, in a kind of song, delicate, subtle, mysterious, unique. One can never come to the end of the exploration of the self by way of language…. Fascinating. Yet I held back in Childwold, didn’t want to be too “poetic,” too musical. Someday, perhaps—with other people?

  The ease of daily life, the inability to take one’s self seriously in a cosmic drama, in “tragedy.” Yet this aspect of personality doesn’t write the books. Who does, then?…The demonic, the sly, the mischievous, the experimental: possibilities made manifest by the bourgeois nature of the public or social personality. Flaubert was right, one should live like a bourgeois, with certain obvious exceptions (for the bourgeois are horribly wasteful of time). Any art must be cultivated slowly, lovingly, patiently. Out of the routines of a normally happy, productive, busy life, with a firm grounding in a job that is, in itself, uniquely rewarding, so much is possible…! If I lived a difficult life, if I were unstable, how could I write a novel like The Assassins or the Spider Monkey,† how could I explore such lives…?

  Little has been said about the enchantment that certain material holds over people. It is not that my personality determines the material, but, in a peculiar way, the material begins to affect my personality, my life, my moods (though, strictly speaking, I don’t seem to have “moods” any longer, as I did in my twenties and earlier). So The Assassins was, in part, a depressing work, and to lift myself from its dangers I had to write other things, however brief, reviews and even letters to friends; and of course teaching is a continuing joy. One never knows what will happen down at the University…! But if my daily life were rather unhappy, the combination of life and the materials of that particular novel would have been deadly, deathly. I wonder if other writers know this…? They should be very, very careful. These are matters quite literally of life and death. Certain subjects are treacherous, they poison the bloodstream, insinuate themselves into one’s dreams and demand complete allegiance: and if one isn’t strong enough to deal with them, what then?

  October 18, 1975.…A dreary windy wet wailing cold day, the first storm of autumn. Juncos and sparrows outside blown about by the wind; the cats inside, fearful of going out. Before this, weeks of almost uninterrupted beauty: we drove out into the countryside, out to Point Pelee, out to Cranbrook, spent many hours walking around. October is Ray’s favorite month. Now everything is changed, it seems an early winter day, nothing to do but stay inside and watch it. Am reading Goyen’s collected stories, to review in the New York Times;* a nice coincidence, my own feeling about “musical” prose and Goyen’s stories, which are like oral folktales done in a very sophisticated way. Almost like prose poems, too…. Am also reading Yeats, that is, rereading Yeats, poring over Yeats once again. Several years since I taught him last. Difficult for the students!…difficult for me. Why did he want to be so difficult? His voice, the voice of “The Tower” and “The Winding Stair,” one of many voices, supremely his. So many other poets imitated him, helplessly…. Not just Roethke, but Frost and Stevens as well; Yeats is there, in them, irrevocable. I suppose this means he is superior to them. Not necessarily: but it’s true, he is superior, he swallows them all up. Frightening, Yeats’s power in terms of poetry.

  […]

  …The pleasure in critical writing: quite different from that one experiences in “creative” writing. (Impossible term.) Where the critic can state the writer must suggest, must hint, must dramatize; one can use words directly, the other can use them as a kind of medium through which the reality of the work will be evoked in the mind of the reader. A considerable difference, a crucial difference. Which accounts for my delight in “critical” writing as a kind of contrast to the other. A good critical essay is, of course, a work of art, and may be even more difficult to write than fiction. But it’s never valued as highly. Though I worked very hard on both my books of criticism,* and it’s obvious that many long hours went into them, reviewers occasionally note that the critical pieces are “naturally” in the service of my novels and short stories, that one would read them mainly to get insight into the fiction…. How ridiculous! As if any sane person would spend so much time writing books to illuminate other books. Critical writing grows out of an intense desire on the part of the critic to speak to and of another writer; it’s a kind of collaboration, a synthesis of voices. It should not be downgraded…. Yes, criticism is an art form, at least when it is governed by a truly creative, generous spirit, and not by the critic’s envy of “real” wri
ters.

  October 22, 1975.…Yeats, thinking of how all thought is frozen into something inhuman…. But we require these “inhuman” points or peaks in order to navigate; we react against them, careen beyond them, outgrow them, rediscover them, assimilate and forget and pay homage to them. So long as we live, we move between the human and the inhuman, the temporal and the “eternal,” the fascination with time, and the indifference to all things merely timely….

  […]

  October 28, 1975.…The ideal art, the noblest sort of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to “overcome” doubt.

  The moralist. The skeptic. The “visionary.”

  All three functions, points of reference, in a kind of harmonious struggle…. One without the others would be disastrous; would reflect an unconscious world, mere nature without the play of the imagination.

  The moralist stands behind the art-work, hopefully refined out of obvious existence, yet one should be able to absorb the morality of the artist…catch hold, now and then, of his or her feelings, motives, without these being obtrusive and distracting.

  The skeptic stands far to the side, detached and ironic. Always questioning, prodding, teasing, provoking, tormenting…. Wringing the moralist’s assumptions dry, draining them of blood and life, knocking the heads together of certain fictional characters who should be, ideally, invulnerable to such assault (since they represent the moralist’s secret beliefs). The skepticism of my work accounts for its playfulness but also, unfortunately, it has caused the work to be misunderstood. Yet the skeptic is at least as important as the moralist…in abandoning that stance or mask, as I occasionally do (in teaching, for instance, when one cannot afford to be too ironic—students easily miscomprehend) one abandons the rich, teasing complexity of the world and offers a simplified (but more accessible) vision…. The “primary” impulse seems to be from the moralist, but secondary from the skeptic. But the relationship is fluid and unpredictable.

  The visionary. Out of the struggle between the moralist and the skeptic there arises, sometimes without my direct effort, a kind of synthesis or vision of these warring elements…difficult to explain, but obvious in the context of the work itself. The work is only itself: the words, the sounds of those words, the play of the rhythms, the relationships between the people in the fiction who are both fictional and real (that is, universal—or, rather, expressions of human attitudes that transcend the particular). It is an experience and like all experience it is ineffable, sacred. The art-work is sacred. The arrangement of words is sacred, and must be approached in awe, with caution….

  First the material, the setting, the characters in their primary or elemental modes. And their relationships to one another, which constitutes what is called “plot” (which is a term that points to the movement of elements through time). Then, a kind of doubling-back or questioning or tormenting of this elemental donnée; an exaggeration of certain elements, almost to the point of parody…without which the fiction would be incomplete. Then, as time passes in the composition of the work, it always happens that a “vision” arises from it, however recalcitrant the material…. Often in the early hours of the morning, waking suddenly, I grasp or almost grasp the “wholeness” of the work, and wonder why I had not totally comprehended it all along….

  November 1, 1975.…Went to bed at 1 A.M., woke at 5, utterly awake and unable to even delude myself into believing sleep might be possible. A pattern that seems to have begun; but why? I am troubled by thoughts I know to be trivial. I feel harassed, teased, provoked, prodded, tormented…and all by trivia! If there were something genuinely important in my life, something not going right…but there doesn’t seem to be…or at any rate I don’t know what it is. The unconscious is restless and torments me, not with adequate images, but with stray banal thoughts and worries of the kind I know intellectually to be inconsequential. What is the emotion behind these thoughts, is there something hidden, something unformed, why doesn’t it show itself…? I have come to the point in my life when I know that nearly everything that is personal is insignificant. These worries—what value have they, when in a few months or weeks or in a few days, even, they are going to be forgotten? “The mind is a monkey.” One seeks transcendence of such thoughts by meditation, by conscious control. But it doesn’t seem to work…. Also, I have the idea that I should pay attention to the thoughts, I shouldn’t try to block them.

  I am so divided, so ignorant of fundamental human truth!—I don’t know whether “We are bodies” or whether “We are in bodies.”

  Yes, well? What?

  Are we our bodies, or do we merely inhabit them?

  At times I am convinced that the one is true, at other times the other. I hope that, somehow, the two apparently antithetical truths—“truths”???—can be resolved. But the way of D. H. Lawrence is certainly not the way of yoga. Instincts are—or are not—sacred. The conscious refinement of one’s soul is—or is not—something we must undertake systematically.

  Have not been in a vital relationship with my unconscious self for some time (except, of course, when I’m writing). My dreams are ordinary, or seem so; they are wispy, disappointing, incomprehensible but not mysterious in the way they were a few years ago. I have not come to any decision about my life. I don’t know: should I continue to put my greatest energies into my writing, or should I “let go”—is highly conscious artistry a kind of egotism…or…is it, in a way, selfless? In public I always de-emphasize the seriousness of my commitment to writing. I can’t bear that people should think—among them my friends—how very deeply I am involved in writing, in a perpetual ceaseless meditation that totally excludes them, as if they had no existence at all. The “meditation” is almost autonomous, has little to do with my personal life. I would be so very, very hurt if my husband had a subjective existence as willful and extended in time as my own….

  “Perfection of life” or “perfection of art”: not a reasonable proposition. Surely one can have both. One can try for both, at any rate. But the art exerts the greatest pull….

  * Oates and Smith had lived in Beaumont for the academic year 1961–62; there she had written her first published book of stories, By the North Gate (Vanguard, 1963).

  † The critic Roger Sale had harshly reviewed two of Oates’s books in the early 1970s.

  * The American novelist Joseph Heller (1923–99) had taken thirteen years to write his second novel, Something Happened (1974); his first novel, Catch-22, had appeared in 1961.

  * With Shuddering Fall, Oates’s first published novel, had appeare in 1964.

  † Novelist and critic William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was a major figure in American literary realism.

  * David Hume (1711–76), Scottish historian and philosopher.

  * Oates’s story “Saul Bird Says: Relate! Communicate! Liberate!” had appeared in the October 1970 issue of Playboy and also in Prize Stories 1972: The O. Henry Awards (Doubleday, 1972).

  * When individual stories from The Poisoned Kiss were published, they were listed as having been “translated from the Portuguese” by an author named “Fernandes.” But “Fernandes” was a fictitious alter ego of Oates’s.

  * Oates’s review appeared in the New York Times Book Review on March 23, 1975.

  * This story would appear in a special limited edition published by Sylvester & Orphanos press in 1978 and would be collected in A Sentimental Education (Dutton, 1980).

  * This story appeared in Fiction International, vols. 4–5, 1975, and was reprinted in her 1977 collection Night-Side (Vanguard).

  † This refers to the novel Childwold, which would be published by Vanguard in 1976.

  * Carlos Baker’s Hemingway: A Life Story had been published in 1969 by Scribner; Joseph Blotner’s Faulkner: A Biography had been published in 1974 by Random House.

  * In the Newsweek cover story on Oates, Barthelme had been quoted as saying that reading her work was “like chopping wood.”

  † This was the worki
ng title for Childwold

  * James’s novel had originally been published in 1886.