The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates

by Joyce Carol Oates

  …Must write another large novel, w/many people, a great span of time. Bellefleur, perhaps. No thoughts on it for months.

  […]

  November 22, 1977. […] Working on the novel, around. Burrowing & groping. Now it seems one thing, now another. A problem is that new novels or novellas beckon. I want to write the one about the man who is killed, in his pursuit of an erotic ideal; I want to write a long story or a novella about a young girl who represents, for others, an extremity of passion…or behavior…that is dangerous, self-destructive, but ultimately (for them) a kind of fantasy-fulfillment.

  […]

  …Plan on writing an Iris Murdoch essay, perhaps over Christmas.* Have several of her novels yet to read. Marvelous writer…. Henry and Cato is my favorite thus far. It’s odd how critics slight her, take her for granted; the fate, no doubt, of the dismayingly “prolific” writer. But she is good. And appears to be getting better.

  […]

  December 10, 1977.…Great avalanches of snow. Windsor is, or was, yesterday, immobilized: we were snowed in for much of the day. Now it’s a blue wild snow-glaring world, with mist rising from the river, really quite beautiful. How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look. (At the moment a puffy-feathered female cardinal is picking at the red berries in the bush outside my window. Marvelously subtle gradations of color in her breast alone…and that chunky almost comic-looking “gross” beak…the crest, the black mask, the pert, perky manner, the arhythmically twitching tail…. The male hits the eye like a sudden manifestation of grace, or even of God: but the female is perhaps more beautiful. And now there is a white-throated sparrow. And another.)

  Working as usual on the novel. It seems that I have been working on this novel for most of my life. Or is it, in some subtle way, working on me….

  (Now the male cardinal has appeared! The two of them are only a few yards away, picking unhurriedly at the berries, their feathers puffed out with the intense cold.)

  …Queer, in fact maddening, to think that “beauty” in nature is for us alone: for the human eye alone. Without our consciousness it doesn’t exist. For though the birds and other creatures “see” one another they don’t, I assume, “see” beauty. And what of certain mollusks that secrete extraordinarily beautiful shells which they themselves never see, since they have no eyes; how on earth can one comprehend that phenomenon…?

  …The patterns exist in our mind’s eye, in our human calculating consciousness. Yes, but: they do exist, they are quite real, one is surely not deluded in assuming that seashells do have exquisite patterns. And what is their purpose? Not for camouflage, certainly. In fact they stand out, their colors and designs are so striking.

  …A tentative conclusion: all of nature, all of the given “world,” is in fact a work of art. Only the human consciousness can register it. But all of creation participates. Is this a sentimental notion, is it perhaps romantically far-fetched? I really don’t think so: it’s the only possible conclusion. And that certain creatures evolved their forms of beauty before the world actually had eyes…before it had any “eyes” at all…seems to me evidence (poetic if nothing else) that evolution, or whatever is meant by evolution, already included the highest form of consciousness at the very start: anticipated it, I mean.

  […]

  December 31, 1977.…A slow calm dazzling ecstatic feeling: finished The Evening and the Morning at 9:45 P.M., New Year’s Eve. So much for 1977…!

  Am very pleased with the novel in its final stages. Now the re-working re-visioning, re-imagining: which should be enjoyable.

  Of course it’s “experimental” in a way Vanguard wouldn’t be interested in, or most readers….

  […]

  …Can life be finer, sweeter? The entire day was glorious: went out to Birmingham to see art, looked at lovely photographs (Weston, Adams, etc.) in the Halsted Gallery, some strained, odd work at Suzanne Hilberry’s […] and bought a beautiful watercolor by Donald Evans, whose work I have liked for years. […] The dismaying thing is, Donald Evans died at the age of thirty-two, in a hotel fire in Amsterdam. Which I hadn’t known about. A pity. A terrible loss…. There is something about Evans’s work that appeals very much to me

  […]

  …How lovely, to end 1977 like this! A perfect day, the purchase of a very special work of art, the completion—or anyway the completion of the first draft—of a most troublesome novel. Onward, now, to 1978—

  * This poem, under the title “Night Driving, New Year’s Eve,” appeared in Hudson Review (winter 1977–78) and was collected in Invisible Woman.

  * Robert Starer (1924–2001), American composer.

  † Among Oates’s activities in New York was the Modern Language Association convention, which featured a session on her work.

  * “Gargoyle,” an uncollected story, appeared in the June 1977 issue of StoryQuarterly.

  † Oates’s review appeared in the February 5, 1977, issue of the New Republic.

  * This story, which Oates never collected, appeared in the June 1978 issue of Mademoiselle.

  * Lardner’s review, “Oracular Oates,” appeared in the January 3, 1977, issue of The New Yorker.

  * One of Oates’s most anthologized stories, “In the Region of Ice” had been collected in The Wheel of Love (Vanguard, 1970). The film version won an Academy Award for Best Short Film in 1977.

  * Oates’s story “The Thaw” appeared in the February 1977 issue of Viva and was collected in Night-Side.

  * “The Short Stories of Joyce Carol Oates,” by Samuel F. Pickering, Jr., had appeared in the summer 1974 issue of the Georgia Review.

  † “Lawrence’s Götterdämmerung: The Apocalyptic Vision of Women in Love” appeared in the spring 1978 issue of Critical Inquiry and was collected in Contraries: Essays.

  * At this time, Oates was rereading James Joyce’s Ulysses for her graduate seminar.

  * This story about “Marian Kern” became “North Wind,” which was published in the anthology Banquet, edited by Joan Norris for Penmaen Press.

  * The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960) was by the Irish-born Canadian novelist Brian Moore (1921–99).

  * Oates’s story based on the relationship between James Joyce and his daughter Lucia was published in a special limited edition by Black Sparrow Press in 1977. It was also collected in Night-Side.

  * This is a reference to Bellefleur, a novel that would be published in 1980 by Dutton.

  * At this time, Oates was putting together the volume Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money.

  * This idea became the title novella for Oates’s collection A Sentimental Education (Dutton, 1981).

  † Falconer, by John Cheever (1912–82), appeared in 1977.

  * This novel by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (1925–70) had first appeared in English in 1959.

  † Though no collection of this title was ever published, the title story had recently appeared in the April 1977 issue of Fiction magazine.

  * Oates had submitted the manuscript of her new novel to Vanguard editor Evelyn Shrifte on February 21.

  * Oates published her (uncollected) story of this title in the fall 1978 issue of Missouri Review.

  * Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) was a Japanese novelist and critic who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968.

  * Oates’s review of The Simone Weil Reader was published in the New Republic on July 2, 1977, and was reprinted, in slightly different form, under the title “‘May God Grant That I Become Nothing’: The Mysticism of Simone Weil” in The Profane Art: Essays & Reviews (Dutton, 1983).

  * In fact, Bellefleur became Oates’s first New York Times best-seller and sold more than one million copies in hardcover and paperback.

  † This is the journal’s first mention of a novel tentatively titled Graywolf: His Life and Times. It was never published, but the manuscript is now held in the Joyce Carol Oates Archive in Syracuse. Eventually, this story of a Michigan-based serial killer evolved into Zombie, published by
Dutton in 1995.

  * Oates’s essay-review “Anne Sexton: Self-Portrait in Poetry and Letters” appeared in The Profane Art.

  * Oates’s uncollected stories “Honeymoon” and “Softball” appeared in the winter 1976–77 issue of Greensboro Review and the summer 1978 issue of Shenandoah, respectively.

  * This uncollected story appeared in the September 1980 issue of Bennington Review.

  † The Evening and the Morning was Oates’s new title for the unpublished novel she had been calling Graywolf: His Life and Times.

  * The Sacred and Profane Love Machine and A Word Child were novels by the British author Iris Murdoch (1919–99).

  * L. E. Sissman (1928–76), American poet and critic.

  * Oates’s essay “Sacred and Profane Iris Murdoch” appeared in The Profane Art.

  six: 1978

  Yesterday, home alone for many hours, thinking very intensely. Very intensely. One feels almost a thrill of panic at the prospect of what might await…in utter isolation. I have all I can do to contend with the images that rush forth, in the fullness and complexity of my ordinary days.

  In 1978 Oates turned forty, and the year marked a milestone in other respects as well. In addition to enjoying a very positive reception for her new novel, Son of the Morning, she was elected to the distinguished American Academy of Arts and Letters, cementing her place as part of the “establishment” in contemporary American literature. This year she also served as a judge for the National Book Awards and participated, in New York, in a conference that brought together American and Soviet writers and literary critics. This latter experience was an exhilarating one for Oates, inspiring new fiction and giving her a broader sense of her place in the world community of letters.

  During the spring and summer, especially, Oates became deeply involved in her “amateur” piano playing, taking lessons with a teacher in Windsor and devoting herself particularly to the works of Chopin. This interest is reflected substantially in the journal entries of this year, as is her interest in contemporary art: she and Smith were slowly acquiring a collection of artworks for their home, and they frequently visited galleries and museums both in Windsor and when they traveled.

  In August, the couple moved to Princeton, N.J., where despite her anxiety over leaving a beloved circle of friends in Windsor, Oates quickly made new friends, among them the poets Charles Wright, Stanley Kunitz, and Maxine Kumin, and the fiction writers Reginald Gibbons and Edmund “Mike” Keeley. She and Smith had, with relative ease, found their “dream house” in Princeton, an unusual) glass-walled structure located in a secluded, leafy area several miles from the university.

  As always, however, Oates’s primary energies went into her writing, and after a long period of gestation during which she wrote many short stories, poems, and essays, and several shorter novels, she finally began, in the fall, her most ambitious work to date, Bellefleur. Though the planning and thinking-out of the novel had been arduous and elaborate, involving more than 1,000 pages of notes, charts, maps, and family trees as she plotted her vast tapestry of interlocking tales of the Bellefleur clan, this groundwork had been more than worthwhile, and the writing itself she found “entirely engrossing” and “mesmerizing.” As she noted on December 12, “nothing is more richly, lavishly, lushly rewarding” than her absorption in the novel.

  Another milestone in 1978 was her change of publishers: after fifteen years with the medium-size Vanguard Press, which had launched her career but which, despite her dramatically increased fame and stature, had continued to offer modest and finally unacceptable contracts to their star author, Oates decided to move to a much larger house, Dutton, in order to work with Henry Robbins, whom her friend Joan Didion had called “the best editor in America.” Robbins immediately began immersing himself in Oates’s writing. Vanguard refused to relinquish Unholy Loves, which the house published in 1979, her last Vanguard title.

  In all, then, 1978 was a bracing, exhilarating time for Oates, and despite all her activities she was perhaps more attentive to her journal this year than in any other. She had acquired Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, and Oates’s own journal certainly began to bear comparison with Woolf’s in its notation of the dailiness of her existence (observations of the natural world, deft sketches of people she met, economical descriptions of the places she visited) and of the travails and rewards of the writing life.

  January 8, 1978.…First week of classes, and everything seems to be going well, in fact excellently. Not so fatigued as I remember being in the past. A promising group of about fifty in “Literature and Psychology”: talkative, lively, even willing to challenge one another and me. […] We begin with The Great Gatsby…and how impoverished, how ghastly-gaudy Fitzgerald’s people all seem, in the somber light of 1978. That anyone should care about such things is the puzzle. (Daisy, trapped at eighteen in her femininity; her daisiness; the bright money-tinkling charming wan gay fascinating murmurous Female whom Fitzgerald clearly adored, at least in essence, but isn’t able—at the present time—to make quite credible. I dread the reactions of my “liberated” women students…. One, chunky and assertive and articulate, in jeans, plain shirt, plain face with glasses, destined to be a favorite of mine, I suspect, telling the class how she’d had a baby at 6:30 A.M. and by 8:30 was doing something quite different and had forgotten the pain (in response to some subtle point about male and female pain, withstanding of, etc.)….

  …Working each day on The Evening and the Morning. Deliberately keeping the revisions down to an hour or two hours a day. My impulse, of course, is always to plunge deeply into something, and stay there until it’s finished, as close to “perfection” as I can get…so I want to resist, I want to take my time with the revisions, and see what evolves by April. The last day or two was feverish, almost too “inspired”; working at such intensity almost frightens me.

  […]

  Read and was sharply disappointed in Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia.” He sets the scene so well, then ruins it all with heavy-footed and wrong-headed “interpretations.” He seems to understand mourning well enough but hasn’t a clue to melancholia. Certainly someone has died in either case! Certainly there is grief. But not in the terms Freud sets forth…. He hadn’t any ear, really, for the music of the psyche. He really was tone-deaf. (Oddly, to make the metaphor literal, so was Faulkner—uninterested in music, unable to read it, respond.)

  …Have wanted for years to write a story of some kind, a fantasy perhaps, about Freud and Anna O. The situation…fascinating…. Went out to dinner with Lois the other evening, the Chinese restaurant. And to lunch with Kay, Liz, Marge, on Friday, in Detroit. […] Now that classes have begun I miss the long blissful placid eventless days of late December when the hours stretched out before me, undisturbed, utterly open, marvelous. When I’m with people and at the University I seem to be quite happy, I am in fact caught up with what I’m doing, but my deepest inclination seems to be toward privacy, placidity, unbroken calm. I wonder if my personality is changing or whether it was always this way…I suppose so, there is evidence to think so.

  I love to wake up early and begin to read. While the house is absolutely silent—Ray still asleep, nothing in motion. And then, after he’s awake, work at my desk. Until 1:30 or 2. Then have breakfast (apple & cottage cheese). Then return to my desk…. Anything, everything, charms me at such times. Working on The Possessed,* or my own novel; dreamily shuffling through my old notes for stories or for Bellefleur; writing letters, postcards; staring out the window (at the perpetually falling snow—and occasionally cardinals, and often sparrows, in the berry bushes; today it’s snowing so thickly that the river is invisible); thinking about the University; about students, classes, colleagues, things I must do, books I must read; day-dreaming; doodling; rewriting a brief chapter in Evening & Morning; browsing through things that have found their way onto my desk, for some reason; thinking vaguely ahead, as the afternoon darkens, to dinner…to what I should prepare for dinner. (Chic
ken with wild rice. Or a steak for Ray and tuna fish for me. Salads. Vegetables: carrots, or brussels sprouts, or broccoli, or spinach et al. Salmon, baked. Shrimp Creole, so to speak. Baked potatoes. Recipes of my own invention, elaborate, slapdash. Scrambled eggs. Etc., etc. Making dinner should be monotonous since I’ve done it thousands of times, and nearly every evening we have approximately the same salad—with everything in it; but for some reason it’s a pleasant half-hour or so, a kind of ritual that is entirely agreeable. Though if I weren’t married I halfway think I would never bother with a real meal, a formal meal, I would probably eat at my desk or read while I ate, or try to eat infrequently…. Eating is one of those things that has no pleasure, indeed it seems to have no meaning, if one is alone. Food doesn’t even taste like food: it’s just a process, a necessary activity. A bore. Meals, even the simplest, are rituals, and must be shared; otherwise they aren’t even “meals”…they’re just periods of eating….