The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates

by Joyce Carol Oates

  March 17, 1978.…Music. Piano. Chopin. Hours & hours.

  Now I am taking lessons twice a week: could take them, in fact, every day.

  Reading less, and writing less. Or so it seems. Actually, I did the Nemerov review for Roger R. the other day, and thoroughly enjoyed it—reading and rereading Nemerov’s essays in Figures of Thought.* It’s like spending several intense hours in the company of a genuinely gifted person.

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  …I can envision an idyllic life, a paradise: each day given over to hours of music, either playing or listening; or, what is delightful, sitting at the piano with the music before me, listening to a real pianist play. How marvelous that such people exist. The necessity of aloneness. The necessity of intense concentration, second by second. If I want, I can replay a passage a half-dozen times on the phonograph, listening to each note, imagining the pianist’s fingering.

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  …Spring. Soon. Today it’s snowing again, but spring is imminent, and while I suppose I should look forward to it I scarcely care. How nice, how supremely marvelous, it would be if time could stop…an illusion one has more easily in the winter, in the lone gray dreary months when everything is frozen in place. The semester is going so well, my students are so likeable, every day there is the promise of music, and work on whatever I am doing at the moment, and dinner in the evening, and Ray’s news of the day—teaching, mail, the magazine, departmental gossip to exchange; ordinary life, ordinary events, really quite wonderful. Who would have it otherwise? Even things at the university have calmed down: Ray has his sabbatical for next year, there is less talk of gloom, less fear of Nationalism.

  March 18, 1978.…4:30 P.M. & the day, the year, life itself is slipping past. Too quickly. I have done nothing all day except play piano, and listen to the Nocturnes, and the Preludes, following the music assiduously; that, and some work on music theory of an elemental nature. I see now that vexation and apprehension over growing old…older…has very little to do with vanity, and everything to do with the quite practical, pragmatic, realistic fact that there will be less time, increasingly less time, to learn, to know, to experience, to admire, to be in awe of, to create….

  Had I another life! Another lifetime!…Or, what is better, a parallel life. Simultaneous with this.

  …The cruelty of the “moralist.” The tyranny of the person who imagines he is moral, and just. John Gardner’s increasingly cranky pronouncements re. morality and “ideas”—“I hate academic things, academic ideas,” he has said. Has begun to describe himself as a middle-brow, and October Light as a “middle-brow novel.” For some reason he is constantly attacking John Barth: why?

  …Khrushchev walking into the exhibit of abstract expressionists, many years ago, in Russia. Denouncing them. “Degenerate art” (the Nazis’ feelings also). The artists were exiled, perhaps imprisoned, destroyed. The moralist and the tyrant are closely related. God save us from both in politics and art.

  …That moment of insight experienced some months ago while playing a relatively simple piece of Debussy has been confirmed a hundredfold: that the meaning of life is to immerse oneself in beauty. Not necessarily create it. But to seek it out, to study it, to learn it (if possible) from the inside. Each piece of music a sacred text that requires meticulous concentration. The precision of music. Consequently I have been listening to the Preludes every day for quite a while and I could very easily see the next twenty years devoted to these twenty-four plus two works, which would never be exhausted.

  …To seek out, to study, to immerse oneself in, surround oneself with, beauty; to be conscious of one’s dependence upon those who create it or, like the performing musician, re-create it. Very little matters apart from this. And the beauty of piano music of all else.

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  March 22, 1978.…To return from the Unconscious, the realm of dreams, with an image; no matter how unsettling, how outrageous or silly or grotesque or embarrassing; to respect the image; to divorce it from its context….

  Reading “The Metamorphosis” in preparation for a class Thursday. How horrible, how heartbreaking…for this time I read it (had I ever “read” it before?) as premonitory…prophetic. Kafka may have meant Samsa to represent himself as he imagined himself at that time but it can’t be denied that if we live long enough we must metamorphose into something not unlike the poor dung beetle. (In the background, people talking about us; objecting to the odor; waiting tacitly, or not so tacitly, for us to die.) My God.

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  …The distressing sense of time passing. One hour and then another and then another. I am feeling it now, at last: what it means to be mortal.

  …An hour at the piano alternating with an hour at “Cybele.” An ideal arrangement.

  …Very pleased with Carolyn Rourke’s instruction, and with Carolyn. The music lessons, now twice a week, have the power to transform me from a fairly exhausted person (2:30, after the second of my long classes) into a more or less energetic one. It’s no exaggeration to say that this fascination with piano has changed my life, and yet the “change” wouldn’t be evident to anyone, not even Ray. How quietly, how placidly, how invisibly the truly significant events in our life take place…. Which is why we continually misjudge one another. Which is why we haven’t a clue as to the inner (and most meaningful) nature of another person.

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  March 26, 1978.…Easter Sunday: grim, cold, snowing, altogether forbidding, but delightful here inside. HAVE FINISHED “Cybele.” And feel spotless as a lamb.

  (Quite apart from the chilly cerebral mock-symbol-laden-portentous structure I think there are some surprisingly beautiful, or touching, passages in the novella…the last few pages, for instance, which I revised several times. […])

  …Having finished “Cybele” I rewarded myself with hours at the piano. Hours & hours. Must have played five hours altogether, or more…. Am feeling now rather strange. Light-headed, excited. (Since I’ve begun working on a Two-Part Invention, #1 in C Major. Played each hand separately innumerable times, tried putting them together, am rattled somewhat by my inability to hear two melodies at once…my inevitable limitations re. music. But. The incontestable pleasure of being an absolute amateur.)

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  March 27, 1978.…Completing & revising parts of “Cybele.” A “perfect” accomplishment that leaves me utterly chilled: yet perhaps in its interstices there is life, a pulsebeat, however feeble and doomed.

  …One must resist the impulse to analyze oneself. However: now that I’ve completed the novella it does seem to me that it is really a critique, savage and mocking, of an entire vision of life…rather than simply the deteriorating, rather silly, “vision” of a man beginning to feel his mortality, the waning of his sexual powers. Cynthia’s way, that of community involvement without idealism, without the capacity for disillusionment, is probably a means of salvation on this very ordinary level….

  What is not ordinary belongs to art.

  …For instance, Chopin. Reading Casimir Wierzynski’s The Life and Death of Chopin (1951, translated). Very much moved. An interesting preface by Arthur Rubinstein. “Speaking of Chopin’s music is for me like confessing my greatest love,” he says. “I am moved, stirred to the depths….” The graceful synthesis of “romanticism” and self-discipline.

  Goethe: “Self-limitation reveals the master.”

  …Query: is it preferable to be the master, or to be his devout interpreter; is it preferable to labor as Chopin labored, in the creation of extraordinary masterpieces, or to be capable of, at least intermittently, appreciating them…?

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  April 2, 1978.…Lovely day yesterday: acquired a beautiful painting by Matt Phillips (at the Donald Morris Gallery), had a very warm and congenial evening with Liz and Jim. Played piano, brooded on “The Preludes,” very little “accomplished.” Revised “Snowfall,” “Small Miracles” (again).*

  Since finishing “Cybele” I don’t seem to be able to write anything, except a fe
w fragmentary pieces. My imagination flies to the piano…. Or to the Morris piece. (Called “Wondering.” A tall, narrow painting, really a monotype, an edition-of-one, vaguely Matisse-like, yet Japanese also, poetic, delicate, muted in tone…. ) Phillips teaches at Bard College. Other works of his are in the Metropolitan Museum, the Phillips Collection, the Smithsonian, the Hirshhorn, the National Gallery, and elsewhere…with the odd exception of the MOMA. I can’t remember when an exhibit made such an impression on me. I really liked all the pieces, and there were quite a few. The power in delicacy, in muted effects! He’s a marvelous artist.

  At the Hilberry, Fairfield Porter; at least half the pieces, or more, struck me as uncannily successful…the paintings from the early 60’s rather than the more recent ones. We would gladly have acquired a Fairfield Porter, needless to say, but Suzanne is asking rather high prices.

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  …Now I am beginning to worry about Son of the Morning. If it attracts the wrong sort of attention, or any more attention than my novels usually attract…. The pleasure, the safety, the aesthetic satisfaction of small press books like Black Sparrow’s, and Herb Yellin’s: what a contrast! The fact that there’s no money in these publications somehow protects one from the inexplicable but undeniable taint of commercialism that qualifies a New York publication.

  …A world, suddenly, of birds! Two minutes ago a yellow-shafted flicker flew toward this very window. The bushes are alive with cardinals, male and female; and innumerable juncos and sparrows. Elsewhere there are grackles, just back in the area, and red-winged blackbirds, and starlings. Eating our seeds are two mourning doves, deceptively beautiful (in reality these birds are pugnacious, bullying), and a noisy bluejay. Though we’ve seen robins on our walks there aren’t any around our house…. Lovely. A lovely world, a lovely life.

  …Piano lesson yesterday, and another tomorrow. Am working on the C-major “Two-Part Invention.” Teaching Kafka and Joyce. Only two more full teaching days to the semester; then the end. So abruptly! The University is in difficult financial straits and evidently things will get worse; its real “decline” will begin about 1982. Alas. I wonder—will we be here then? Or will we settle elsewhere? The future looks problematic. What a shame, really, what a pity, when the Department is (for all my complaints, and everyone else’s) composed for the most part of such good people. And to think that it may very well dissolve in the next few years….

  …The human world, of financial problems, minor politics, various affairs, is always discouraging; even “triumph” in that sphere is a precarious thing, and can shift quickly into irony. But there is another aspect of the human world that is more permanent, that shades into the non-human, the transcendent. What I know of that world gives me confidence. Temperamentally I am at home there…ultimately it is my home….

  April 6, 1978. […] Doing galleys of Son of the Morning. The first two chapters I found very moving, in fact I began to tremble while reading them, reading every line, making a few revisions. Perhaps it’s just my end-of-day feeling: my “sensitivity” is always keener at such times (it is now 7 P.M., I must make dinner, omelet and vegetables and salad), I feel uncannily vulnerable, undefined. An apple at noon, no breakfast, and even that apple a nuisance to eat when I hadn’t any appetite, rather strong tea, and my afternoon class (which went so swiftly), and my music lesson (how I love Carolyn’s house—warm and congenial and colorful and filled with life—a lively parakeet that chirps when I play certain familiar pieces, and flies outside his/her cage, wings aflutter with excitement—though as Carolyn says it’s too shy to fly over to the piano; the dogs Puppy and Mitzie, both rather shy, comely females, quite small; the evidence of a normal family life normally lived…Carolyn, gifted as a pianist but not too gifted, not burdened with talent, an enthusiastic cook, amateur artist, mother of four boys, wife of a strong-willed rather ebullient man, somewhat larger than life…a marvelous person, really…whom I will miss next year;* and she’s a fine teacher for someone at my level of capability) and the drive home, tonight through a dismal cold rain…. Sobering thoughts of: remaking our wills, doing something responsible about setting up a trust fund for the magazine, my manuscripts, etc.

  April 7, 1978.…Lovely spring day. We took a long walk this morning, bought a few things for tomorrow night’s party, discussed the magazine, our impending trips (too many? too much?), the need to deal with our estate in a halfway responsible manner. (Leaving everything—literally everything—to the Canadian Cancer Association is a careless gesture; we must rethink—what to do with my manuscripts, what to do with the magazine.)

  The idyllic winter is over. All the snow has melted. (Except down by the river where there are massive ice-chunks still jammed up against the pier, and an endless sun-glaring flow of ice from the north.)

  …Working, but very slowly, on “Nocturne.” Or “Night Song.”* It threatens to become too long, like everything I touch. Adrian & Paula & the young mother. & the threatened child. I know precisely what I want to do but how, exactly how, to achieve it…and what tone to take. Must avoid cynicism, even the irony must be muted, Adrian and Paula are not contemptible after all.

  …Nice letter from Stanley Lindberg. The Georgia Review will print my essay on The Possessed, probably next fall. Which means the manuscript of essays is almost completed. Which means…. (Revised the introduction to the book, and a few pages in the Dostoyevsky essay.)

  …Reading Joseph Brodsky’s poems in the Selected Poems volume, translated (and very well, I think) by George Kline. A fine poet…. Poetry as a “mode of endurance.” Intensely private, introspective, “tragic” in temperament. Rather like Frost, whom he admires. […]

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  April 9, 1978.…Last night’s party went beautifully; I was rather sad when the last guests (John and Sue, Ed Watson) left around 2:30. […] Ray and I were up until five, talking the party over, cleaning up. It must have been the best party we’ve had, or very nearly; a pleasant going-away party for ourselves. (But now I don’t want to leave, I don’t want to give up the house and these people and the settled-ness of my life here…. ) Got up at nine, played piano, have been working desultorily on “Night Song,” which I’m tempted to scrap. Music is music, and why should I try to transpose it into fiction…. Better to keep it separate, distinct. I don’t like the protagonist of the story and I don’t think I have the structure yet in focus and I’d far rather play piano, I could play almost constantly, how frustrating it all is….

  …The larger world, the world outside our lives: the economy, politics, declining morale: what can one say, or even think, about it? I have no hope for the collective. The larger the “collective” the more certain it will be betrayed by its leaders, or by its ordinary citizens. Why, I don’t know. A “tragic” view of life, or simply a realistic view…? The Soviet theme of disillusionment with Communist ideals and leaders can hardly absorb me—for who could have believed such things anyway?* Not that sharing-the-wealth etc. isn’t a good idea but that the revolution wouldn’t be eventually betrayed. Where more than a few people are gathered together the seed of corruption, or selfishness, always flowers. Again I don’t know why—haven’t any idea. But egotism asserts itself, inevitably, in any relationship that isn’t tempered by mutual regard and affection.

  …Parties, parties. As Virginia Woolf comments in a diary or a letter—it’s impossible to say why we like them, what value they have, how they justify subsequent exhaustion. […]

  April 13, 1978. […] Yesterday, to Ann Arbor, there to meet with Tom Wolfe, who gave the Hopwood Address in the Rackham Bldg., the same building I spoke in two weeks ago exactly (surprising, that the seats weren’t all filled for his talk): Wolfe in his trademark vanilla ice cream suit with pale blue shirt and pale blue socks and white shoes (rather rushing the season, those shoes), a nice person, warm and congenial and, offstage, not at all pretentious. His talk was low-keyed and superficial, perhaps aimed for a somewhat younger (or less intelligent) audience. I am thinking of writing him
a letter…. We talked a bit, though not at great length. The two of us were “guests of honor” at the Inglus House dinner following the reception, which meant that we were many yards apart, at either end of a very long table.

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  …No luck thus far trying to rent our house; and prospects at Princeton aren’t inviting. (Rentals are prohibitively expensive—someone has offered us a house near the Institute for Advanced Study, at only $750 a month—not including utilities!) We are asking $350 for this house, but no one appears to be interested. Such a boring, tedious side of life, this business of arranging for houses, moves…. I’m almost tempted to remain where I am.

  …Piano lessons. Rising early to practice an extra hour. Byron and Carolyn Rourke are flying to France this Saturday for two weeks, and then Ray and I are going to NYC, so I won’t have a lesson for some time; which is disappointing, and oddly unsettling. It’s no exaggeration to say that I am infatuated with the piano, and with piano music, right now—the word love being, perhaps, too melodramatic.

  […]…Am doing galleys for Son of the Morning. How very closely Nathan’s experiences parallel certain experiences of mine. And his ostensibly eccentric ideas. I believe in much of what he believes in (the essential spiritual nature of human beings, our interior-ness) while at the same time I can see, not without humor, that his beliefs aren’t very plausible. Ah but still: we are souls inhabiting bodies, and the bodies are the least significant parts of us.