The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates

by Joyce Carol Oates

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  (I am writing this quickly and recklessly because I really want to return to my novella, “All the Good People….” It’s going along well enough, with a few small pleasant surprises, a decidedly minor work, for that reason satisfying; but I can’t seem to get to it. Returned from NYC to the usual small mountains of letters, many of which must be answered at once. Among them John Martin’s queries about Spider Monkey.)

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  Donald Barthelme took Ray and me to lunch at Hopper’s, 6th Ave. & 11th St., then to his apartment nearby. He is high-spirited, sharp, intelligent, perhaps a little domineering—though in a charming way. Enjoys drinking. (Thank God Ray was along; I would have disappointed him.) When I said I thought I’d seen City Life on the best-seller list once he immediately flared up, denied it, bet me $100 (wisely I declined the bet), called his editor Roger Straus at once & made me talk to the man, in order to be told that Barthelme had never had a best-seller, no, not once. (He seemed unnecessarily concerned with money matters. Is it just alimony, or something else—? Perhaps he thinks I make money on my writing!) In all, Barthelme strikes me as a most charming, in a way haunting person. I keep thinking of him. Why…? He doesn’t care for my writing, nor do I care for his, in general. But that seems in a way insignificant. He & I are colleagues of a sort; inexplicable. Perhaps we’ll meet again.

  Lovely afternoon with Gail Godwin & Robert Starer at their rented house in Stone Ridge. Pastoral; good conversation; warm & lively people. What riches the human world offers—the “bright peopled world” beyond Windsor. Home now, we are a little homesick for there. Beyond Windsor.

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  Donald Barthelme is evidently trying to establish a kind of literary community. He seems to want people to meet, to become friendly. “You should meet Susan Sontag,” he said. “You’d like her.” No doubt, but she wouldn’t like me.*…The Morgans want me to meet John Simon, who is (of course) “not so bad as he seems.”† Why, no one could be…! And I never did call Lillian Hellman, as I knew beforehand I wouldn’t, out of timidity; and she seemed so friendly to me last year.

  Writing isn’t so lonely as people commonly think, especially not the writing of poetry. And the reading of it—! A marvelous communal experience. Sheer enjoyment. Words are meant to draw us together, after all. Published words are no longer private creations. Using the language, we are immediately related to everyone else who has used the language; we are no longer isolated. (And what a beautiful language it is, English…Wonderful fluid miraculous bits of sound transformed into meanings, the miracle of all languages: how on earth is it possible? I glance over the page of words and marvel at it. I did not create this. What god presided over the birth of language in our brains…? There is no true isolation, then, so long as one has language…. )

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  May 24, 1976. […] Finished “All the Good People I’ve Left Behind” tonight. 104 pages, a surprise. Could have been longer. In the end I became rather attached to these characters, especially Fern. Bits & pieces of myself everywhere.

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  May 26, 1976.…Rereading a few earlier entries in this journal.

  I am struck by the general tone of “otherness”…of an alien sensibility. I write these entries, of course, but the “I” isn’t recognizable.

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  Does anything I write ever represent me….

  It is a continuous but not necessarily evolving process. I feel myself at the center of a multitude of “selves,” of voices. I can be anyone, I can say anything, I can believe literally anything. Whatever lends itself to belief…on the realistic or mythical level…how can one resist? I can’t help honoring the naivete of others by accepting their inclinations, if not their beliefs in fact. The truth is that I believe nothing: which is to say, everything.

  I believe in the believers. They are, after all, irrefutably true.

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  May 28, 1976.…Vanguard re. Childwold when I spoke of it as being a kind of prose poem: “But we mustn’t say that!”

  Have begun thinking of Son of the Morning again but can’t possibly start writing for a while. Too much to sift through, too much to absorb. Nathan’s physical self isn’t yet clear. I want to express such very intimate feelings and thoughts in this novel…seek analogies for experiences…and…and a great deal more: everything. The flight upward, the plunge downward, the suspension & sinking into human life. So much…. I should structure this as a large ambitious novel like The Assassins but it seems to be demanding a briefer, more poetic shape. (Not another prose poem, Vanguard would cry. I suppose I can’t blame them since Childwold is hardly commercial…. No, I don’t blame them. No one owes a writer anything; publishers are not meant to coddle us, to be condescending or charitable toward us.)

  No appetite today. Woke feeling…feeling what?…lazy, listless, slightly disgusted. (With what?) Each summer a reaction against the mild ceaseless predictable idyllic character of our days. A pastoral life: just outside this window, shrubs filled with warblers. Even a hummingbird. Ray is working on his Churchill manuscript* & the magazine. (The magazine is disappointingly slow in coming from the printers out in Victoria. We wait, and wait, and wait. Promised for early May…now it’s May 28 and the issue still hasn’t arrived. Perhaps it’s partly this that discourages me.)

  A slight sense of dread. For what reason…? Last night, thinking or half-dreaming of some private catastrophe. We must assume something will happen someday to destroy our idyllic lives. Our life. It’s possible that no two people have had so satisfactory a marriage or relationship as we have…which makes it…which introduces the…

  ???

  Remember now a possible cause of my disgust. Skimming through Capote’s “Answered Prayers” in Esquire yesterday. What surprised me was Capote’s style, so pedestrian in the story, so flat and…unmagical…ordinary…skimmable. I had been impressed with In Cold Blood. But his more intimate voice is prosaic, reductive, empty, ultimately a little silly. Not the ornate self-consciousness of a Humbert Humbert, for instance, or the passionate self-loathing of Dostoyevsky’s underground man; not even the quickness of Roth’s characters contemplating themselves. All so empty, banal. The roman à clef nature of the work doesn’t bother me as much: I assume the real Katherine Anne Porter was quite different, the real Tennessee Wms., etc., and Capote has simply used look-alikes for his fiction. But he shouldn’t compare himself to Proust, who writes so beautifully. “Answered Prayers” (which I keep wanting to type as “Unanswered Prayers”) is barely mediocre as a narrative…. Capote presents himself in a strange way. Self-loathing yet a certain measure of pride. Others, like Gore Vidal, have commented on Capote’s youthful comic appearance but he seems to have felt he was attractive. His cruelty, self-promoting, egotism: as qualities in a fictional character they don’t seem so excessive. One reacts more passionately against virtue…especially in a journal of the kind I am writing. (Unlike Capote I have nothing to confess. And I feel nothing much about that state of affairs—neither satisfaction nor embarrassment. Nor do I intend to apologize.)

  …Haunted by a sense of something disharmonious. I suppose it lies in a dream or in a half-conscious thought of yesterday…or the night….

  A universe of raw singing voices. Competing. Occasionally in harmony. (But is this harmony accidental?—No.) We flow through one another’s lives & disappear. Memories are totally unreliable. (Perhaps I am thinking vaguely of the Capote work. People will remember as vaguely & dimly & w/comic modifications just as Capote “remembers” his acquaintances.) Events occur. It is their interpretations that baffle. Living so close to another person as I live with Ray I can compare notes with him re. “events” constantly. Those who live alone or who keep their contemplative lives secret from others must be constantly deluded…biased…in various stages of ignorance. Ray & I experience something together and then afterward while talking about it we discover that I interpreted it one way, he another. A friend still another. And the universe opens up dizzy
ingly….

  (Am I absurd to wish to know the truth? Of the people in The Assassins those who seek the truth perish. Only Stephen is willing to live with mystery, with the frustration of not-knowing. As we must all live. But….

  But….

  I fear the consequences of an emotional (as well as an intellectual) acceptance of this life-condition. I don’t want to drift into that not-caring state of mind I was in some years ago as a result of Zen meditation. (“Not-caring” is perhaps a poor term. But there is no term. Experiencing each moment of one’s life under the aspect of eternity, in a sense. As if one were dead. Living, dead. Dead, living, awake. Eternally awake. Such is the blessing & also the curse of “Enlightenment.”)

  What is the truth about any relationship?—any human life?—any event? There is none. There are many. They compete, cancel one another out, one sometimes triumphs, but it is an empty triumph…. It may be I am really thinking about Nathan now. I don’t know. I feel a sense of loss, of grief, the necessity of eating appalls me, as it did some years ago…I mean the fact that one must eat…that in a few hours the results of not-eating are evident. The brain is so intimately bound up with…. The spirit with…. Like a fire, a wood-fire. The fire burns, the flames spring up, the wood is consumed, the fire dies down, dies. Calories. The dance of life. You must eat, must consume, your body floods w/nourishment & heat, if you don’t continue the process you die down, die. The grim frightening aspect of this predicament is hidden from us, of course, by the fact that food has become ceremonial & symbolic. As soon as one loses his sense of taste, however, the oddity of the situation is clear. Eating is no longer a pleasure but a duty. One must eat. And there’s an end to it.

  Food-filters: those creatures of the sea who eat constantly w/out tasting anything. People filter one another through their lives, their fantasies. Yet we don’t want to be merely “filtered through”…! We want to stay, to be held fast, to be valued, cherished, loved. At least not dismissed as an anecdote. Unfortunately that will be the fate of many of us in our personal lives. (And books too can be “filtered through” uncaring minds. And dismissed.)

  …In pursuit of an image, a half-thought, a side-glance. Why do my less happy moods interest me so much more than the others…? They are rare; they are deep; and promising. Out of turbulence there invariably comes something interesting.

  Out of apparent disharmony a sudden breathtaking harmony.

  Is it the rising of Nathan’s moon? Nathan whom I see as a child of Poe, of Hawthorne, of Melville, of Thoreau in his darker being. Therefore he insists upon image & metaphor, not direct statement.

  The child of Merlin. Banished, and now returning. (But not to triumph; to ordinary mortality, instead.)

  …Wrote the poem “Enigma” today.* “Food-filtered.” Fascinating, horrifying. However, one must remember the Buddha’s admonition: Not to attempt to think the unthinkable.

  My happiness has always been: those others think the unthinkable in my place. I think only—of them. Great lovely tapestries in which St. George & his dragon are equally comely. (My characters are those others whom I give birth to, and who in turn give birth to me perpetually. My fate is perhaps theirs but theirs certainly isn’t mine. I outlive them.)

  They outlive me.

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  May 29, 1976.…Worked on the poem “Last Harvest.”* Over & over again the lines, written in pen first and then typed & retyped & typed again. One must have infinite patience. A ceremonial sense to composition once one gets beyond a certain point…but until one reaches that point it’s sometimes frustrating.

  (The value of this journal for me: a transcribing of my experiences in writing. Otherwise the process is lost, swallowed up in the final product. I have only the dimmest memories of emotions experienced while writing books years ago. A sense of euphoria with the style of Expensive People†…a sense of deep emotional involvement with Jules and Maureen‡…a sense of despair in terms of Wonderland, like a person caught in a maze, unable to get free. In more recent years many of the pleasures of Do With Me What You Will…are still with me; the tangle of Hugh’s mind in The Assassins; the close identification with Stephen…. I would like to know now what I felt while writing my first published novel, but it’s forgotten. And some of the early stories which were so groping, so experimental in their own way—in terms of my own way of seeing and ordering things.)

  A reluctance, though, to save my various drafts. For one reason they are unintelligible: the first drafts are in pen. Scribbled over, doodled upon, X’d out as I transfer passages from notes to another, more formal draft. The leap between notes and first draft is so considerable that it would appear something was lost anyway. And the leap between first draft and final draft is also immense. What takes place on paper is so trivial compared to what takes place in one’s head that the accumulation of working drafts would only confuse anyone who studied them…. Working with a writer’s transcribed notes would be misleading; much is masquerade.

  What is the compulsion to disguise oneself…?

  Perhaps it is true, as Jung says or seems to say, that the establishing of a “mask” is a built-in instinct in man, an archetype. Not one mask but many. Therefore it is not hypocritical but wise, natural, and valuable—and moral—to create a persona for various contexts. Certainly my own experience leads me to confirm this hypothesis. It is the presentation of an utterly frank, open, trusting, naïve, genuine self that strikes me as being in a way perverse and hypocritical. Far too late in our species’ history to pretend to be an infant…. The value, then, of knowing a number of people who are substantially different from oneself and from one another: in each context one is forced to create a different persona. One comes to like people as they differ from oneself. Even to love. (Does love spring out of a magical awakening of an opposition of intellect or temperament…? There is always the sense of an adventure, the sense of things being thrown up into the air to fall in a new, unanticipated pattern. The “love” I refer to is ideally romantic love, which I haven’t experienced for years, in the sense of its being new, a surprise, etc., but one can have the same general experience in terms of friendship, a milder form—the same “newness,” the thrill of discovering someone very different from oneself. In contrast to this is the marvelous stability of comradely love, marital love, a long-drawn-out lifetime of friendly love.)

  …Immersed in poetry, seeing the world (perhaps) in a slightly different way. Images, language, incantation. These new poems are like incantations. I hear the sounds and must match them with the meanings implicit in the poem. The meanings come first…but are in a later sense incidental…the sounds, incantations, overwhelm.

  Style supplanting “meaning.”

  What is art? All that we can’t be? Can’t control?

  “Everything speaking in its own voice.” Yes: and subordinated somehow to our voice, our structure.

  Poe is disappointing because nothing speaks in its own voice. All is Poe. Poe Poe Poe Poe. (Must read Dan Hoffman’s book on Poe.)* The rhetorical frenzy which I suspect is the result of hurried composition…translated into emotions of an extreme, hardly human sort; comic book drama. In reading Poe I am struck not by similarities between us (which critics have suggested) but the essential difference between us: in my writing everything is human, in his nothing is human. One comes to see the man arranging and rearranging stereotypes (castles, haunted manors, crypts, lovely pale women, etc.) rather than creating character or making the slightest attempt to realize the “character” of a place. He is finally concerned only with the bare idea of a fiction: with theme. With me the reverse is usually true. “Theme” is important, one supposes, but far more important is the livingness of the narrative. There must be life, there must be lives, some conscious and some unconscious…there must be opposition, reconciliation, defeat or victory or…a curious unity….

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  May 30, 1976.…Working on poems. “Holy Saturday.”† Innumerable drafts.

  (Last night at the Graha
ms’—elegant lovely spacious house.‡ Elegant lovely people. Kind & generous. The persona I am in their presence evidently deserves their friendship.)

  Thinking of the invention, spontaneous & otherwise, of personality. Persona: mask. Personality: mask. Might it be a fact that not even my husband knows me since in his particular presence I am…that which his presence evokes? Without him I am someone else, I would soon be someone else. This is a fact. Neither sorrowful nor joyful, simply an is.

  Rereading my interview with Joe David Bellamy after many years.* Struck by the hypothetical nature of the persona—experimental—leg-pulling. Even as I typed out those responses I must not have meant them, not even in a hypothetical way. I invented a persona that would seem impressionistic, uncalculating, naïve, “inspired”: but why?