The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates

by Joyce Carol Oates

  March 28, 1976.…Rereading Alice in Wonderland after many years. A sense of disorientation. Pleasure interspersed with alarm. This was the first book I read, but I hadn’t “read” it as I read it now.

  Do we ever “read” the same book twice? Do we “read” the same book others read?

  Wonderland a world of pleasurable metamorphoses. Contrary to what some commentators have said, Carroll’s world isn’t really nightmarish. It is very verbal. It is sensible in its own way and not terrifying, never violent, never sadistic. An ideal book for a child. Ideal for me: teaching me the essential harmony of the universe, the possibility of triumph if one simply keeps going, never forgetting one’s basic self. (It isn’t the case in Wonderland that Alice really forgets who she is. The “Who am I?” of Wonderland is merely verbal, merely playful. It is quite sane. It is a game with a solution.) Through the Looking-Glass is rather different. Here, nightmare is possible. “Jabberwocky” is fearful though the words, grown frantic, try to dissuade us. And that catastrophic ending…! (I believe it did frighten me as a child. I had dreams, even, that mimicked the changingness of that ending…. )

  Wonderland: triumph of fantasy, play, good humor, wit, civilization. Alice is civilized. Alice is a very nice girl, but not too nice. She is every little girl, perhaps: she was certainly me for some time.

  Was I Alice, as a girl?

  Am I still…?

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  April 1, 1976. […] Someone told me that I was the “most hated” of contemporary writers. I can’t believe this. I don’t even know very many people…! I have stayed away from NYC, away from the literary world, I have declined being a judge for the NBA, I really lead a quiet and almost secluded life…. The resentment that others feel toward me is an exaggeration, surely; if they could see me sinking beneath innumerable student papers perhaps they would take pity on me.

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  April 3, 1976. […] My birthplace. Strange fascinating eerie dreadful yet plausible. (“Erie” County I always puzzled over. Erie, eerie. Transmuted to Eden. Eden County. But the entire geographical area shifted some hundreds of miles to the east, mythically set north of Albany, in the general area of the Adirondack Mountains. I felt the need to deal with “Eden County” and not with “Erie County” and would have been too restricted, in terms of naturalistic detail and historical event, had I written directly about my own background. By transferring certain incidents of my childhood to “Eden County” I saw them transformed in various astonishing and unpredictable ways; shaped more naturally into art, given a resonance and a peculiar dignity that would not have been theirs in “real life.” Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County is evidently a quite authentic representation of Faulkner’s home county; Jefferson is Oxford (but minus the university)…. His leaving out the university is, however, significant. He shifted it elsewhere, he simply didn’t care to deal with it. “Sole Owner & Proprietor.” The impulse of every writer is to create a fictional world that represents the “real” world in abbreviated, heightened, poetic fashion. Thus Bellow creates Bellow’s Chicago which he calls “Chicago,” but which is nevertheless Bellow’s Chicago (and not Nelson Algren’s, or Studs Terkel’s). Philip Roth’s New York is his own no less than Beckett’s interior landscapes are his own. Otherwise there would be little pleasure in art: it would be a mere attempt at reportage.

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  April 6, 1976.…Great success with Alice in Wonderland. Students react imaginatively to it, love Carroll’s subtleties & jokes. Unfortunately the semester ends in two days. So very much has been left unsaid…. The world of childhood. Not childhood that fascinates me so much as the kinds of perception childhood necessitates. A child is physically small…fairly powerless…knows so very little but feels so very much…has no money, no freedom, no protection from adults (hopefully the adults close to him like him)…no clear sense of the future. A child exists in a nexus of invisible rules that become visible only when broken.

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  I can’t remember my childhood. It is lost.

  Memories come back spottily, disjointed, confused in time. I don’t remember so much as see. Images, scenes without people, intensely-felt sights of the old farmhouse, my old room, the dressing table Daddy made for me, the mirror, the various knickknacks and figurines my grandmother gave me, the glass shelves, the little window above my bed, the linoleum, the dresser/wardrobe, the rug, the folding door. Some of these things I have given to Laney of Childwold; but Laney is not me, of course; Laney is someone quite other…. Memory of measles & a very high fever & my parents sitting beside my bed, worried that I might die. I was very sick, very sick. Fever. They really thought I might die; there was that possibility; how horrible for them…. My mother was so young then, only about twenty-five. Think of it! So much younger than I am now! A very pretty woman, and my father of course an exceptionally handsome man as the snapshots show…. The fascination of one’s parents.* Undeniable fascination. How unfortunate it would be to have parents who are in some ways disappointing…or absent…or determinedly ordinary.

  Memories attached to locations. The creek, the creekbanks, the various paths beaten through the fields, certain enormous trees…bushes…the old Weidenbeck (pronounced Weeden-beck) house…used for “The Giant Woman”†…the pear orchards, apple orchards, scattered cherry trees, the field where we grew potatoes…the vegetable garden…the old barn…the blacksmith’s equipment…the chicken coop & the chickens & the ritual of feeding them…the innumerable cats…our two or three dogs. So much more real, once I apply my mind to it, than the “reality” of the present time. Within a few minutes I can transport myself to that world, Millersport when I was about five or six, but I can’t recall myself in it, very little dialogue, few meetings with other people. It’s all a scene, a setting, a landscape awaiting population. Which perhaps accounts for my conviction that in most good writing the setting is one of the characters, one of the most important characters. It speaks. It lives. It makes its presence felt…. The old schoolhouse! So many memories & emotions attached to it. A place of infinite mystery for me which I must have loved, though I and the other smaller children were routinely teased and sometimes terrorized by the older boys. Books…maps…spelling bees…the fascination of the dictionary I won in some contest or other (Buffalo Evening News spelling bee!)…the feat of memorizing 300 Bible verses so that I won a week at Bible Camp (dreadful place: the other children weren’t very Christian. Religion always embarrassed me)…my parents’ and Grandmother Woodside’s surprise at my accomplishments, and eventual pride….

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  April 26, 1976.…The public side of the utterly private act of writing: always jarring because unexpected. One does write to communicate, primarily, but what is communicated often seems beyond the writer’s control…. An uncomprehending and rather chilly review of my books of criticism in the New Statesman, by my acquaintance Tony Tanner, who seems to resent the fact that I’ve written criticism at all.* It hurts, it baffles, it temporarily depresses…the misunderstandings that seem willful, especially when they are those of acquaintances who should (granted, even, the cruelty of the literary world) be at least open-minded. What hurts most is Tony’s offhand remark that I probably wrote the essays “without any revision”—which is of course absolutely false, and yet I can’t very well defend myself. I had not remembered Tony’s manner as so petulant, so suspicious.

  If younger writers could anticipate what lies ahead after their years of arduous labor and their hopes and fantasies and sacrifices (if anyone still “sacrifices” anything for their art)…would they believe the effort was worth it? If it weren’t for the satisfaction of writing as an end in itself, apart even from the money involved, I wouldn’t advise anyone to write. Not at all. Therefore I’m at a loss about advising writers who are modestly gifted but who find writing very hard work, not really enjoyable. I really don’t know what to say. I look at them and think, But why do you want to write if, in fact, you suffer so…? The rewards won’t compensate for th
e suffering. The “rewards” are so mixed, so ironic. Why do you want to write if you really don’t want to write?

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  April 29, 1976.…Lovely spring day though rather chilly. Went for two long walks of several miles. Am trying to think out a voice, a way of seeing, for Son of the Morning.* If I do the novel in third-person it will be one sort of novel; if I do it in first it will be entirely different. I am reluctant to choose a voice because that voice, once chosen, will exclude all the others….

  The pleasures of writing “experimental” fiction are mainly those of the writer. I can write that way, but can’t force myself to read very far in others’ experimental writing. It is so self-conscious, so deliberate, artificial, restrictive…a peculiar sort of puritanism despite its ostensible freedom.

  The mysterious element: plot.

  How slenderly we understand it. Plot. Is character destiny, so that destiny is an expression of character and not anything so crude as “simply that which happens”?

  Plot as the working-out of fate. Uncoiling of individual fate. A determinist universe, then—? No.

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  May 1, 1976. […] Strange incident: a very young redheaded boy came to our door, knocked, gave to Ray an envelope with “Joyce Carol Oates” written on it, said his father had sent him. Ray brought it to me and I opened it, and it was a clipping of a review from the Irish Times (an unusually intelligent and certainly very generous little essay by Eavan Boland, on The Edge of Impossibility and New Heaven, New Earth). The return address on the envelope had been inked out. So we don’t know who sent it. It’s peculiar, at times unsettling, to think that people around here evidently know us…but, apart from a very few neighbors, we don’t know them. We live in a kind of goldfish bowl, almost never aware of others’ attention or interest…. The Irish Times! Amazing.

  Went for a long walk east along Riverside Drive, almost got caught in a rainstorm coming home; sky looks malevolent; another tornado…? (There have been tornados sighted off and on for weeks.) Without a cellar we will simply have to brave it out.

  …This period of my life is the laziest I’ve been in recent memory. Finished grading at the University yesterday; languidly began a short story (about a man of late middle age whose wife is dying…who wishes desperately to begin a “new” life…but of course cannot); wrote three poems, one of them “Abandoned Airfield, 1976,” which I like quite a bit and which moves me, uncharacteristically, to tears.* Otherwise—very little.

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  May 6, 1976.…A day of writing, rain, solitude, quiet. (Yesterday was filled—almost too filled—with people: lunch with B.H.† at the Dominion House, long intense conversation & discovery of many interests in common but many others not in common, therefore stimulating & inviting; conversation with Gene McN. on many topics; a most welcome letter from Miguel* on the road to Algonquin Park, hitchhiking; a surprise gift (a silver letter-opener from Tiffany’s) from a man who attended my reading at Ohio; dinner at the Steak House with Lois Smedick.† […] Through it all I drove about hither & yon thinking about the long story I’ve embarked upon, knowing the story is at heart not profound but nevertheless worth doing…. ‡ There is pleasure in projects known to be small, sweetly trivial, & patterned upon a design known in advance. However, the story might turn out differently as I continue: my sense of humor might throw all these people up into the air and let them fall where they may.)

  “All the Good People I’ve Left Behind.” Was there ever so banal an idea, so inevitable an idea, yet so strangely irresistible (to me)…? I wasn’t a married graduate student in Ann Arbor in the 60’s and Ray and I didn’t live in married students’ housing and we didn’t have a couple we were close to…and our lives subsequently have turned out far different from the lives the story investigates. Why then do I feel such an intensity of emotion for the two couples? It’s peculiar. I know that such people lived and are living still and perhaps it’s the gradual working-out of their separate fates that entrances me…. The subtle defeats and enlargements, the surprises (which we know in advance but they don’t know), the paradoxes, ironies, qualified triumphs…. To realize that life happens to oneself and not just to other people—! That a kind of pattern appears, inevitably—!

  “We are not the readers but the very personages of the world drama.” Wm. James.§

  May 7, 1976.…That knowledge comes primarily through the senses in an empirical way; that it arises (somehow) inside the mind, the structure of the mind: extroversion, introversion, a pendulum that swings ceaselessly. Robert Bly’s essay on the awakening of the senses in poetry, the discovery of the shadow (the Jungian shadow, obviously): seems to assume that an acknowledgment of the shadow necessarily makes a person better, more liberal. But why? Perhaps the average human being isn’t “good” or even very nice. Why must we assume he should be decent and then, reacting against his shortcomings, condemn him? People are not flawed, it’s the idea that they are flawed that is mistaken.

  My idealism never really evaporates. I am still as naïve as I was years ago, despite the “evidence of the senses.” Idealism leads to revelation and to despair. One must not, dare not, be an idealist. Better realism, whatever that means. A healthily skeptical vision of mankind’s possibilities.

  The idealist believes he should see ideals and ends by actually seeing them—and not seeing the ordinary men and women around him. Hence the Orient’s holy men & their visions of the One; the perfect Buddha mind; a vast galaxy into which sufferings & imperfections are tossed. A kind of indifference, contempt for what exists. Cynicism. But its outward face is benign & holy.

  Working on “All the Good People I’ve Left Behind.” Given energy by the knowledge that the story or novella isn’t “one of my best.”

  The gradual immunity of life. Growing older, we grow apart from raw emotions because we’ve experienced them before.[…]

  Leaving tomorrow for my parents’, then to NYC to stay with Evelyn. Poetry reading Monday evening. Then: freedom to explore New York. Our favorite city. The only city.

  May 20, 1976.…A totally enjoyable, many-faceted visit to New York City. The undeniable attraction of that city: its pulse, atmosphere, people. (NYC is much maligned by the rest of the country out of resentment, one suspects. There is only one city in the United States and the others are envious.) Visited with my parents and my brother Fred and sister-in-law Nancy on the way down; drove through central & southern New York State on a Sunday, to Evelyn’s on Central Park West; stayed there until the following Saturday.

  Innumerable impressions….

  Evelyn Shrifte a wonderful, hospitable person; what might have become of me, if I hadn’t been taken up by Vanguard? I am grateful for the personal attention I’ve received there and don’t take it for granted. Warm, friendly people, always approachable. And Evelyn is highly intelligent. (Her apartment is a strange place. About ten rooms on the tenth floor of a handsome aging building—135 Central Park West—grown quite shabby over the years. The living room is attractive enough, with a marvelous view of the park and the city skyline (especially beautiful at night). Elsewhere there are water-stains on the windowsills and the ceiling, the plumbing is ancient, the bathroom not very clean, the guest-rooms rather dusty, unheated, sad, strange, old. A depressing place in wet or overcast weather.) […] Ray and I like Evelyn very much, I feel a deep, strong affection for her, which would be very difficult to articulate, but staying at her apartment does have its negative sides; but it’s absurd to be critical, after all. Much of NYC is run-down. Even affluent people live rather crudely in certain respects.

  Our first evening, we walked in the mid-town area, down to about 53rd St., and back to the apartment. Had dinner on 57th St. near Carnegie Hall, a small Italian restaurant. Our great joy at being in NYC together again. Such a sense of romance…! Holding hands, looking in store windows. Indefatigable. (Which is fortunate since we walked innumerable miles in the next several days.)

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  George Plimpton took me
to lunch. Paris Review interview (done by Bob Phillips). Scheduled when—? Not for years, I suspect.* George P’s apartment on the East River, 72nd St., very handsome, congenial. Windows on all sides. Books. In one room a large pool table. (Which I could do without, of course.) His daughter came in, a pretty six-year-old, asked if they could go bicycling, he said they’d go later in the afternoon since he needed to do some shopping. (Charming aspects of NYC life—a man of Plimpton’s age and stature going shopping on a bicycle.) Lunch at a crowded and popular restaurant on Lexington & 75th. One is impressed with the physical attractiveness of many New Yorkers—it is only surface, perhaps, but it is at least surface…. The Paris Review’s distinguished past. So many marvelous interviews: the most recent being James Dickey. (Rather reckless in his derogatory remarks about other poets.) A sense of tradition, continuity, a fearful sense of…what?…being drawn up in a stream of writers, an impersonal ceaseless stream. Being good copy…. Liked George Plimpton and his managing editor Molly very much. My old friend Bob Phillips friendly as always.

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  Afterward, we met Ray at the Guggenheim. From there, strolling along Madison Ave. Looked in galleries—almost bought a small Pissaro (Jean-Paul, that is) priced at $4800; seemed rather high. Saw Carol Anthony’s show of small life-mocking forms—eerie creations, almost alive; parodies of a certain kind of small-town American life of the recent past. Very imaginative, successful…. Saw David Holmes’s beautiful, melancholy paintings of rural America at a gallery on, I think, East 57th (?); would have loved to buy a painting but they were rather expensive also—$7800—barns, steeples, fields, old decaying houses. Wyeth-like, yet finally quite different…. Visited galleries in SoHo as well; but they were disappointing. Aggressively amateurish avant-garde art, not very original. On Friday, we went to the Kennedy Galleries on 57th St. & bought a lithograph by Leonard Baskin and another by a French artist named Minaux. Had wanted a Ben Shahn but those that were outstanding were very expensive ($20,000) and those we could afford weren’t quite so appealing.