The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates

by Joyce Carol Oates

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  January 13, 1978.…A blue-white day, freezing, with a very fine dry powdery snow falling, falling, falling. For the past twenty-four hours or more. Yet it’s been lovely at home: truly lovely. Working on my essay on The Possessed. Reading & rereading Dostoyevsky.

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  Some very welcome news the other day, and I must say it was totally unexpected: I’ve been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  …It was welcome. It made me feel less of a…do I want to say failure?…no, not really: I hardly consider myself a failure. But…. It made me feel less quixotic, then. Yes: quixotic. I might have speculated that if the invitation to join that slightly ridiculous group ever came I would have rejected it: but I would have been quite mistaken, since the letter, from Ralph Ellison, or at any rate signed by him, did delight me. I opened it in the English Department office, and was quite amazed. Even though I can see by skimming through the names of the members that many of them are “distinguished” without being very distinctive, or even remarkably talented, and I can figure out certain connections (so many of them are New Yorker writers, and Howard Moss is the president of the literature group),* it still is a very welcome thing and I find myself happily pleased that I am made happy by it. After all—I’m so frequently perverse—it might have had, on another day, very little effect.

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  January 29, 1978.…More revisions on The Evening and the Morning. But I must let it go soon. It’s time, it’s time….

  Thinking over the outline for a novella, rough notes typed out on November 6. That would make a fairly engrossing story (the worship of Cybele, in secret; in the unconscious)…but perhaps I would rather do a more serious, longer work.*

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  Reading Henry James. “The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant—no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.”

  Of course there is a limit. What we do is limited by what we are. James’s voice is not Fielding’s voice, Virginia Woolf’s voice is not Dorothy Richardson’s. But in essence James is right. And one novel more or less expands outward into another…. The myriad forms evoked by one chosen form always beckon. I mean—the form eventually given to one novel has displaced a variety of other forms, which then demand expression. (Which is why, I suppose, one keeps writing, one likes to begin planning for a new novel immediately upon finishing a novel.) (And there’s a certain sentimental homesickness for the community of a novel.)

  …James: “experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.”

  …James’s life-long commitment to his art. How many volumes? 35? 60? I wonder, did his passionate commitment to his vocation annoy people as mine seems to annoy certain people?—critics, I mean, and reviewers. And rivals—“rivals.” I have noted in certain reviews an exasperated, angry tone, as if the reviewer disliked me personally. But no one needs to read my writing or even to comment on it. A baffling thing…. It’s as if I were resented for my very seriousness, the obvious depth of my commitment. While they are alive the frivolous seem to be most generously received, after their deaths the “serious” are more likely to be honored. But “serious” people are so often embarrassing….

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  February 3, 1978. […] Did galleys for Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money. A curious thing, to be shy of one’s own work—convinced it isn’t first-rate, I have not dared to examine some of the poems for a long while; consequently I was surprised at times, and even pleased, that certain of the poems do work. At least I think that if they belonged to another poet I would admire them. But since they’re my own, and I know my limitations as a poet, how can they be particularly good….

  …My strategy, which began as simple modesty, a painful sort of modesty, of not seeing and not contemplating what is both disappointing and beyond alteration. Though “disappointing”—what does that mean, really? If I didn’t even turn to my own story in Penthouse, not wishing to leaf through that absurd magazine, was it out of shyness or “disappointment” or sheer good sense…?

  Blanche’s curt statement that it is “impossible” to take back “Friday Evening” from Penthouse.* Very well, then—I suppose my request was annoying to her. And having had one story in Penthouse, why not another—the damage, if damage there is (and I doubt it), has already been done. Someone said that Barthelme had a story in recently too. So we’re all guilty, of indifference if nothing else. (But Don needs the money. And I don’t.)

  …Working on The Evening and the Morning, still. An endless pleasure in revision.

  Have been asked by an editor of the New Republic to be a Contributing Editor; have accepted. It’s the most consistently intelligent magazine published today.

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  Without the novel’s momentum guiding (or dominating) my life, my life is a simple, clear affair…a series of events…so easily managed. Teaching, for instance: isn’t it marvelous? And yet one is paid. After a novel is completed I am on holiday. But a little melancholy. Or do I just say that, out of a conviction that I should be melancholy…?

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  February 12, 1978. […] Bellefleur haunts, but at a distance. I begin to think that I will never get there. Why, I don’t know; don’t know; so many pages of notes, so many excited, almost euphoric hours of dreaming, and planning, and plotting…. And I’m still excluded, still on the outside of those walls, the garden in which Germaine plays as a child: the actual prospect of starting to write the novel disconcerts me, I know the feeling well, I’m simply not ready, not ready. Perhaps I must wait until I’m even older to deal with childhood…. Perhaps at the age of fifty I’ll be capable of it.

  …In the meantime, more realistic goals: the little morality tale “Cybele” too haunts, here on my desk, waiting its transformation into drama.

  February 14, 1978.…Valentine’s Day. Ray has given me, perhaps without intending to, his cold; now I am sick and very weary, and it’s only 11:30 A.M…. Only 11:30 A.M. Have been playing a Chopin Prelude (needless to say, a very simple one) and my left hand aches.

  …Yesterday, finished the first little chapter of Cybele. (Or do I mean “little”—it’s twenty pages long.) Writing it was queerly draining, as if I were involved in poor Edwin Locke’s pilgrimage instead of being Olympian and lofty and refined out of existence. But then. I am not Cybele, after all. I am closer to the human beings in the narrative. Or am I? So prematurely exhausted, so eye-achingly-sick, I scarcely know what I am. (Woke in the middle of the night, damp from perspiration; my throat dry and sore and raw; tasting awful.) Still….

  Still. It isn’t the flu. And compared to the flu almost any other state of being is healthy.

  …No, I really can’t, and shouldn’t, complain.

  Fascinated with Chopin. Have been listening and listening to the second Sonata. My heart aches, listening to it, I feel somehow dragged around the room and at the same time so privileged…. It’s a privilege, too, to sit at the piano and struggle through the Prelude, the little one-page Prelude (what is it?—Opus 28)…and the Bach piece…and the others…. Thank God my grandmother and my parents thought to give me piano lessons when I was ten. (I think my grandmother paid for them…?) Otherwise this would be entirely lost to me, and it would be like being color blind: a dreadful loss, about which one would know nothing. Listening to music is all very well and good, in fact, of course, it’s marvelous; but playing…or even stumbling through…is an entirely different experience. One hears the music spring into life, one shares the composer’s genius…and all on such a deep emotional level…that ineffable plain upon which we are all one…though the moments, the tiny instants, don’t last; can’t possibly last.

  Art: the indisputable transcendental
function.

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  February 19, 1978. […] Worked yesterday afternoon on “Cybele.” Hour after hour. Headachey from the cold, which lingers, a nuisance; groggy from the Bufferin; but as time passed a remarkable feeling of energy came over me, a truly healing sensation, so that while at 2 P.M. I couldn’t anticipate working more than an hour before I’d have to give up and lie down, by 6:30 when I finally stopped I felt rejuvenated, the way one ought to feel in the morning…. Thank God. Have written thirty-nine pages on the novella and feel more or less pleased with them. A grim sad story but funny. A funny story but grim etc. Poor Edwin. Poor men. Poor maleness.

  A subject about which I know more than I should: maleness.

  …A bright sunny Sunday, not too cold. A robin in the front yard, terribly displaced. But singing bravely. (Calling for help?) Innumerable sparrows, juncos around the feeding table, plus some cardinals, occasionally blue-jays. A puffed-out suffering thrush, the other day, in the bushes here. Shivering with cold, or so it appeared.

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  February 20, 1978.…John Gardner’s illness (cancer of the colon), his operation, plans for another operation….

  (I can’t think of the possibility of his death. I haven’t been able to, and I don’t think I will. It’s very difficult to fathom. It really is very difficult to…to take seriously, somehow. Can John die? Well of course. Rationally I know that. Yet at the same time…. )

  (My inability to grasp certain things. I wonder—is it natural, is it an inevitable aspect of life, living, not-thinking, not-knowing, not-being-able-to-know.)

  Well, we’re all getting older. The “cosmetic” side of it means so little to me, what might be called the egotistical side, that I have to remind myself that there is, after all, another sort of reality connected with the passage of time. One’s parents age. Indeed. Husband, friends, acquaintances. I can accept my own aging and eventual death (yes, but can I?) but the prospect of the others leaves me silent and baffled. The only mitigating circumstances re. my parents is that they are so much happier now than they were in the past; retirement has done them both so much good…it would be hard for them, or me, to want the clock turned back.

  Stopped, perhaps.

  Yes: stopped. Because life at each moment, or very nearly, has been so fine. Since about the age of thirty-three, for me. Hard to say why yet it’s so. That December in England, in London, the flat on Park Lane…a sort of turning-point…. Now if only time could stop! But it won’t. And we’re enticed to want it to speed up, everyone who teaches looks forward to Fridays, and to the end of terms, and…. (Not me, however. Not right now. Things are going too well in all three classes. Even the weather, which everyone detests, doesn’t annoy me: I rather like this climate, in fact. Cold, snow, ice, unmeltable ice over streets and sidewalks, and who cares…? The immobility of winter; the privacy; the sense of needing to stay indoors and get things accomplished: an introvert’s treasure.

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  …Gene suntanned, sunburned; back from a week in Aruba. John Ditsky looking hearty. My colleagues. My friends. It’s difficult to assess how much I like them, particularly in the context of this University, this department: how empty it would be here without them, and Al and Lois and a few others. It would be simply—empty. Blank. So that is why sensible people fear the passage of time: because it will take away friends. One needs long-standing friends, old comfortable silly friends, with whom to joke and gossip and fritter. At Princeton, my God, who can joke with me about all the old topics…I will be doomed to perform in the role of “Joyce Carol Oates” and the slightest lapse from it will be eagerly recounted as eccentricity. I will be transformed into a series of anecdotes over which I will have no control and in which I have no interest.

  American Academy: the waltz of the immortals.

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  March 1, 1978.…Hours, days, of Chopin, mainly the Preludes. I have the music now and try to follow Arrau. (What a brilliant pianist—some of the things he does are dizzying.)

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  …Skimmed through John Gardner’s Moral Fiction.* Cranky, careless, inaccurate, mean-spirited. I wonder—why did he do it? Why attack his (former?) friends Bob Coover and John Barth like that? So cruelly pointless. So self-serving. He is jealous of them, and of Barthelme, and Updike; why not admit it? I am one of the few people he singles out for praise (however faint, however dim) yet I still feel the sting of the book, its silly complacent didactic self-righteousness. He’s been physically ill, of course—yet I almost wonder whether he hasn’t been somewhat emotionally ill as well. The book is hysterical and certainly will not help his own reputation. Why on earth did he bother….

  March 9, 1978.…Piano. Chopin. Classes. “Cybele.” Cold weather mitigated by blue skies. This is certainly a serene life, at least on the face of it…yet I doubt that anyone’s “serene” life is lived that way from the inside. For all of us, for most of us, drama asserts itself at every turn.

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  …Teaching Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with surprising success. And O’Connor’s rather oddly understated “Greenleaf.” Both solid works, really; even the Albee.

  (How frail, how slender, is the thread that keeps us ourselves. It must be a matter of…of the level of one’s blood sugar? For I’ve been having the most curious kind of flashes of light-headedness lately. Probably it’s only from having missed a meal. Not dizziness, exactly; when you’re dizzy you don’t really lose the connection with yourself. But this sensation is…purely…it’s a pure tuning out, a disappearance of self…. As if I could suddenly slip away, vanish; and not even pain or fear would remain. But I can’t eat more than I do, it simply doesn’t attract me, I have no appetite. Now at 6:00 P.M. I’ve had one apple and some tea and I’m not really hungry. To force myself to eat more would not only be unpleasant but a waste of time. And I must admit I’m beginning to regret the time I waste eating. When I could be playing piano. Or writing. Or reading.)

  Reading Marianne Moore again. Awfully good. And not “miniature” either.

  Life, life. Sad letter from Bob P[hillips] about Don Dike, our former professor. Dying of throat cancer—has refused to be operated on.

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  March 15, 1978.…Perfectly idyllic day at home. Reading Andrew Field’s Nabokov: His Life in Part. […] Working on “Cybele.” Icy-cold, detached. For that reason perhaps I am not at all reluctant to grant Edwin some of my deepest convictions and doubts. I begin to see, in fact, that “writing” can be cerebral, almost totally cerebral; a matter of organization, style, the dramatization of ideas. Most of the time my writing evolves out of a deep, often tense emotional layer and it is an unsettling experience…one can feel shaken, tossed about, worried. But this sort of thing—allegory, morality, playful symbolism […] is almost effortless. I can only write a few pages at a time, I suppose there is a kind of effort, but it is mainly intellectual, cerebral.

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  …Classes are going extremely well lately. Why am I tempted, like all academics, to quit teaching, to withdraw to books and occasional lectures, etc., when in fact (and this is something I discover every year) I am so much in my element in a classroom? The larger the better, in fact, though I prefer less than 100 students. Yesterday, teaching Albee’s Virginia Woolf, innumerable laughs, points made, things actually taught (it’s marvelous how any work of literature can be a vehicle for the teaching of certain truths—about literature, or life itself), fascinating remarks offered by certain students (there are three A+ people in this class of fifty!—imagine). Well, there’s nothing quite like it. I love these days off, I love the laziness of turning from one book to another to another, then playing piano for an hour; then mulling over Chapter 11 of “Cybele,” then thinking about what to prepare for dinner…but I love the heady excitement of teaching too, for it is a valid excitement, unmatchable elsewhere. What a loss if I gave it up! Yet the impulse toward withdrawing, slightly, is always there; all academics seem to have it. Odd…. What I love about teac
hing is the unpredictable nature of what I find myself saying (despite preparation—and I’ve been preparing, surprisingly; even to the extent of reading this Field biography) and what the students offer. It’s a lovely, enviable life. Only when a group of students isn’t intelligent, or something has gone astray, is the experience draining. But that happens so rarely.

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  Nabokov and his varied, fascinating life. I find Lolita less interesting than I once did. But. Still, he’s a fine writer, possibly too self-indulgent, but rewarding; and I enjoy reading about him once the distractions of Field’s prose are set aside. (Nabokov must have loathed the book. I can’t blame him.)…In the end, ultimately, one must grant the writer his subject and his voice, just as we must grant, or should, each individual his uniqueness. It’s hard for a critic to make this concession, of course. In fact it doesn’t belong to criticism at all—the gesture, any gesture, of supreme charity. But as a writer ages, as he passes into mythology, like Nabokov (and will I, too, on a somewhat different level?—on a quite different level) it seems that criticism is somehow beside the point. Just look, listen, regard, admire; and be grateful. And then go on to another writer, another artist.

  But the critic must be making “judgments.” Fussing, arranging, ranking, comparing. Balancing his primary statements with however, on the other hand…. In effect ruining his relationship with the artist. One cannot be friends, one cannot be friendly, with anyone who is ranking us or objectifying us so relentlessly. […] No wonder Nabokov, given his immense pride in himself, detested critics. They are potential friends who have betrayed us…who have spoiled the possibility for friendship.