The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates

by Joyce Carol Oates

  April 15, 1978.…A very deep sleep, from which I awoke entirely rested (I haven’t felt “entirely rested” for weeks) and with the absolute conviction that I must revise certain sections of Son of the Morning, before it’s too late.

  …So, this morning, rewriting the already-revised section in which Nathan banishes Japheth; and developing further the section at Patagonia Springs. The eeriness of the writing: to see, there, on the page, given to a fictitious person, some of my own convictions, knowing they are bizarre and yet knowing that they are, more or less, correct. God as the force which creates and sustains all living creatures, and allows them the illusory “knowledge” that they are separate from one another; God as devourer, and creator. I believe it all, really. Yet I’ve managed to escape, thus far, Nathan Vickery’s collapse and speechlessness.

  (He doesn’t seem to have comprehended, however, the idea that “God” is also “love” of a kind. Or at any rate intense sympathy.)

  …Working then on a poem, “Painting the Balloon Face.” Which isn’t quite right.*

  …Three hours of piano. Or was it more. Playing everything I know, memorizing scales (exasperating, G major and E minor; D major and B minor), doing various finger exercises.

  …Reading Russian poets: quite intrigued by Zinaida Hippus, who is evidently unknown in Russia now; and Anna Akhmatova, whom everyone likes; Osip Mandelstam (however, I do believe his satirical piece on Stalin wasn’t worth his life—it doesn’t strike me as a particularly good poem); Vyacheslav Ivanov; Vladislaw Khodasevich; and of course Mayakovsky, who is both absurd and sometimes moving; and Voznesensky; and Bella Akhmadulina. Some compelling stories by Abram Tertz (that is, Andrei Sinyavsky), a woman named Tarasenkova, someone named Alexander Urusov who may or may not exist (he may be a pseudonym).

  …Something fascinates me here. I think it’s the Soviet writers’ instinct for pseudonymous lives; careful duplicity; the creation of and control of a public self, while the interior, private self exists in secret. With the Soviets there is nothing playful about it, it’s done in absolute seriousness. Perhaps there are writers—perhaps there are many writers—who maintain an inner, secret self without sharing their knowledge with anyone at all. One could be, almost, a member of the Writers’ Union, writing and mouthing their propaganda-drivel, while maintaining a secret self all the while…. But the strain of it, the guilt at such hypocrisy, expediency…! That would be crippling, I should think. And if there were others involved, families, children….

  …My sympathy for someone like Sinyavsky. Who, fortunately, according to Deming Brown, is now living in Paris, after having been in a concentration or labor camp for several years. But there are others, at the very moment, in mental asylums….

  Ironic, to be meeting with “established” Soviet writers in NYC. While others, the dissidents and the criminals, are in exile or in prison. Typical diplomacy, hypocrisy. Yet I suppose it would be altogether wrong to say anything. Not in the spirit of the U.S.–Soviet Writers Conference which is to stress positive rapport….

  April 17, 1978.…Lovely day, chilly & sunny. Went for a long walk. Talked of our impending trip to NYC: a great deal to be done beforehand.

  …At the piano for hours. Working on the #1 “Two-Part Invention,” which is coming along well; and the other pieces; and “La cathédrale engloutie,” which is too hard—the chords too immense for my hands. But a lovely piece of music.

  …Read with interest Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language. She is a fine poet, apart from her rather fanatical feminism…radical/lesbian stance…anti-male bias. Does she think, do the radical feminists really think, that only men were in favor of the Vietnam War…? Would that life were so simple…so simply apprehended.

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  …John Ditsky gave me a present, a recording of Berlioz’s Te Deum, which is of course beautiful, but I can’t get interested in it; I want to hear only piano music; I want to hear only Chopin. Listening & reading through the Nocturnes last night. The challenge is, to keep myself away from Chopin and at my desk.

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  …Reading more Soviet poets & writers. Thinking. Thinking of a short story involving a Soviet writer…a former dissident, who has been imprisoned…but who has a family back in Russia; who is consequently vulnerable. He would be confronted with a very shallow sort of American, perhaps an interviewer, someone like Tom Wolfe…all “style,” no substance. Or should the American be a woman….

  April 19, 1978. […] Preparing to leave, Friday morning, for Lockport, Millersport, New York City. The Soviet delegation looks disappointing: I suspect several of the “writers” are mere party hacks (they are secretaries of unions); only Valentin Kayatev seems substantial. Ah well. It should be, at the very least, an educational experience….

  …Glancing through piles of mail at the University yesterday. Skimming an asinine “interview” in some Ohio newspaper, a dull-witted journalist who approached me at the Birmingham book-signing, of course it’s all well-intentioned and friendly and nice, but such drivel…. My God. The queer image of me that people have, or have invented: that I am big-eyed and shy and tremulous etc. etc. Solemn. Grave. According to this idiot my eyes “registered fear” when he approached with his tape recorder. (Fear! No doubt it was simple hostility.) Asked a question re. one of my novels I “seemed nervous.” Oh it’s all such…drivel. […] Most of what is “known” about other people is drivel, unsubstantiated rumors and “memories” recounted by so-called friends, or outright enemies; people who want to impress themselves upon history, so to speak, with their intimate knowledge of a great personality, but who want nonetheless to achieve a small sort of triumph over that personality by adding unpleasant or grotesque or merely humbling details. It is a fact not generally recognized that any detail is mysteriously crippling. To know how many cavities Shakespeare had, or what sort of sordid cheap exchange went on between Shelley and one of his loves, or the money worries of Dostoyevsky, or…. In some cases, as w/Hawthorne, in his American Journals, one is positively impressed; Hawthorne emerges as a person of greater depth, and greater humanity, than one might have thought judging simply from his stiff allegorical stories and novels. But in most cases it’s simply garbage, clutter, drivel….

  The impulse to go into hiding: quite strong at times. Perhaps I will someday. But. This life is too enjoyable, teaching and friends and various visits; it seems a great deal to surrender merely for the solace of having one’s privacy more respected. Of course one can send out into the world an image that is contrary to one’s deepest self, thereby protecting it; to some extent I seem to have done this already. That my reputation for being shy, tremulous, “almost pathetically serious,” is belied by the fact that I teach full-time, address large classes and large audiences, that I frankly enjoy the commotion, and certainly enjoy a small circle of friends and a small social life, no one seems to notice, or to register. It’s as if my real life, my real self, continued undisturbed by the silly tremulous “image” certain literary journalists have taken up.

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  April 30, 1978.…Returned home today, a lovely chilly Sunday, at about 7 P.M., daylight savings time; have been gone—how long?—eight days. The Soviet–US Writers’ conference was very moving, in fact one of the most interesting and memorable experiences of my life. Yet difficult to assess though Ray and I have talked of nothing else for days….

  A crowded, intense trip. The reading at Millersville went without any difficulties; my “serious” poems first, and then at the very end one or two of the satirical poems […]. Visited beforehand w/my parents; Daddy, fifteen pounds lighter, looking healthy, and Mom her usual self: cheerful, energetic, attractive.

  Poetry reading, Sunday evening; Monday morning two classes (at nine, ten). Then to NYC. Stopped for lunch at The Ship Inn, an eighteenth-century place on Highway 30, had to hurry to get to the Gotham Hotel on time for the briefing at 4:30. There, a very attractive older woman with chestnut-red hair came up to me, said she was delighted to m
eet me, shook hands, etc., and I didn’t know who she was—though I discovered a few minutes later that she was Elizabeth Hardwick. (Somehow I had imagined she would look much older. And plainer.) Met Kurt Vonnegut, of whom I’ve heard so much from Gail Godwin; and he is charming. And Edward Albee, whom at first I rather dreaded. (His reputation for being cold, formidable, sarcastic. […]) Bill Styron. (Who must be one of the nicest, most congenial people I’ve ever encountered.) Norman Cousins is a delightful person, infinitely patient and tactful […] I was rather unprepared for the Soviet delegates’ friendliness. And their insistence that I am “famous” in Russia (and Lithuania).

  Buffet dinner, not very tasty food, at the Cousins’ apartment on Central Park South. John & Martha Updike there. We talked at some length. The Soviets’ interest in me was rather startling. (They seemed sincere.) The formidable Nikolai Fedorenko (who, according to Kurt, used to bully Adlai Stevenson when he was ambassador to the UN), the editor of Foreign Literature and chairman of their delegation; the very interesting, oddly charming Yassen Zassoursky, Dean of Journalism at Moscow University; and Mykolas Sluckis, from Lithuania, who followed me closely about, smiling hopefully, unable to speak English.

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  I liked Yassen the most. Perhaps because he’s traveled so much, knows English perfectly, was funny, warm, informative, eager to talk about his membership in the Communist Party, and his family background, and his work at the University. (He is an American literature specialist, in addition to being Dean of the Journalism School.) Unfortunately we didn’t take pictures of any of these charming people….

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  …George Klebnikov, the interpreter. Remarkable man. I want to write a story about the unsettling experience of earphones, simultaneous interpretation, the metaphysical uncertainty of listening to a language that is, and remains, foreign…indecipherable…no matter how attentively one listens. (Might one fall in love w/a foreign language?—with the people who speak it so effortlessly, and so mysteriously? I was flattered by Mykolas’s interest in me, which was almost boyish; but Yassen’s more sophisticated interest was more disturbing…. The fascination of these people who are, in so many ways, similar to us…yet at a certain point one encounters something unshakable, their faith in their own received truths. Yassen, for instance. A quick-witted, charming, wonderfully friendly person, a man whom I came to like very much (which is unusual, for me); yet I know he would countenance dissident writers being persecuted (“They are not really writers,” he said, and went on to say something about “anti-Soviet” activities) and sent to labor camps. He feels the need for censorship of written work. He mentioned being a friend of the (former) Russian ambassador to Canada (who has just been expelled from Canada for spying!)…He invited me, and Ray also, to Moscow; and Mykolas has invited us to Lithuania. (2.5 million people there. 1 million Lithuanians in the US.) Of course we’ll never go.

  …Kurt Vonnegut, walking out of the conference when Fedorenko spoke of the dissident writers as ordinary criminals. “Why do you Americans want to tell us what to do?” he asked in his calm, reasonable, steely voice. “Why do you even want to tell other people what to do….” I was tempted to leave also. But of course I wouldn’t: the other Soviet delegates were so congenial. (Except perhaps for Felix Kusnetsov, a high-ranking official in the Moscow Writers’ Union.) Politics, diplomacy vs. literature, literary people. Odd. Tiring. Yet I rather liked the several days of the conference and suspect that I will remember them for a very long time.

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  May 3, 1978.…Working on “Détente,” which goes slowly despite my emotional involvement.* The other day I was lying on the bed with a headache, still baffled, befuddled, by my experience w/the Russians…. At heart it’s an old, elemental paradox: how can people whom you like, for whom you feel actual affection (as I felt for Yassen, without doubt), not be people of whom you approve…. How can you like someone who is, or might easily be, repressive, cruel, even murderous…. (I keep hearing Yassen say that the “dissidents” aren’t really writers, that they are involved in “anti-Soviet”—i.e., illegal—activities.) Perhaps because I want the story to solve these paradoxes for me it goes slowly, very slowly. Also, to put it mildly, I have many distractions.

  For instance: warblers just outside this window. Flitting about in the berry bushes. A myrtle warbler…what looks like a Canada warbler…. Also, earlier, there were cedar waxwings. And, yesterday, a vigorous bright thrasher kicking about in the leaves beneath the bushes. And two black squirrels nearby.

  …Have been going for long walks. Grateful for sunshine, spring, despite the incessant northwest wind. Flowers are out: forsythia, tulips, daffodils, jonquils, hyacinth. Lovely time of year. Changeable skies, however: as changeable (to use Simon Dedalus’s expression) as a baby’s bottom.

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  …The new issue of Ontario Review is out! Beautiful cover, graphics by George O’Connell. Fiction by Anne Copeland, Gene [McNamara], Greg Johnson, poetry by Tess Gallagher, who is so fine, and Barry Callaghan, etc., etc. We’re both quite pleased with the issue; Ray has been receiving compliments….

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  …Wrote “Forgetful America”*…looking through innumerable notes from the Conference…sifting impressions through my mind again, again, again. Meeting with the Russians has certainly made a strange impact on me and I don’t think I’m able, really, to gauge it…. Also, meeting Edward Albee and liking him…and Elizabeth Hardwick, and liking her…and Styron, William Jay Smith, Arthur Miller, Harrison Salisbury, Kurt Vonnegut…. The contrast between reputation and image, and the individual himself. Always dramatic. Though I know as well as anyone the distortions of the image yet I am surprised, nevertheless, when people turn out (as they most often do) to be so warm, congenial, reasonable, likeable…even lovable. (Jill Krementz said that Kurt came home and told her about meeting me: “But she’s so nice!” Which indicates, doesn’t it, that he had expected someone quite different…?)

  May 7, 1978.…Working on “Détente.” Most of it is completed; now I am rewriting scenes, pages. The experience of writing the story was almost as profound as the experience of certain intense moments of the conference itself. Though sometimes more profound, since Vassily was closer to Antonia, emotionally, than Yassen to me. And the “infatuation” that was so touching was Mykolas Sluckis’s for me, not Yassen’s—Yassen not being quite so demonstrative. But I felt very little for Mykolas…it was more embarrassing than flattering, and a bit of a nuisance, particularly at the Doubleday dinner where I was stuck with him, and Felix K., neither of whom speak English.

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  The long walk w/Yassen, conversation about American culture, thinly veiled dialogue about America, Russia. In the background, on all sides, like a movie set, the sunny variety of Central Park…. You must come visit us in Windsor, I said, and he said with an embarrassed smile, Our government and the Canadian government are not friendly these days…. (Incident of a spy ring, rather clumsy spies too, in Ottawa; the Ambassador among them; evidently a friend of Yassen’s.) Yassen wanted to interview me in one of our hotel rooms; Ray objected; I said to him, Yassen is too old to be thinking of such things—whereupon Ray said angrily (and I suppose not unreasonably): “He’s only a year older than I am!”

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  May 10, 1978.…Have condensed all of the Preludes, that hopelessly ambitious project, into one single poem. One single poem, after all the planning!*

  Still, it’s a solid poem, I like it well enough, I can’t make it any better. I have such a headache from this poem, and from the past two hours at the piano, going through again and again the E-minor Nocturne, hearing it as it should be played and as I am forced to play it….

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  “Prelude.” Tall coffin. Chopin. Valdemosta. His relationship w/George Sand interests me not at all: garish and improbable and mad. But not really interesting. Not as art. His art is the only reality. Hers was craftsmanship of a sort (so I gather, I haven’t read her novels), directed toward
a definite end, that of making money; his was art, and therefore impersonal. How the Preludes were composed is fascinating, of course—the bizarre circumstances, Chopin’s ill health, etc.—but ultimately irrelevant. If they had been composed in a comfortable drawing-room by a man in excellent health they would be no less prodigious.

  My brief poem “Prelude.” Chopin’s imagined voice. Not much but all I have to “set against the tall coffin.”…There are times when one feels close to drowning in the mystery of life itself. Why, why!—I can’t explain. I am so deeply touched by the music I’ve been struggling with and by this poem and by Chopin’s genius…. That he was as frail as I, and even weighed a bit less, makes the mystery all the more profound.

  …Reviews and criticism: to avoid. Nevertheless I opened the Spring 1978 Virginia Quarterly Review to read this amazing review (in its entirety): “One of the great contemporary literary giants of North America, who has previously intrigued us with her novels, plays, critical essays, and poetry, has now successfully turned her imaginative pen to the realm of the short story. This anthology is a haunting collection of 18 separate gems, each of which deals with that eerie borderland between reality and the paranormal. It seems almost unfair for one person to have such a rich and diverse talent.” (Night-Side)