Literary giant! Now turned her hand to the short story! My God.
…Taking notes for Kristin’s novella.* The kidnapping & death of Moro, reported coincidentally. I had originally wanted, some months ago, to do this story by way of a man who assassinates someone like Mayor Daley; odd how it’s evolved. Can I be sure it’s for the best?…Kristin, an unlikely assassin. But I need to get close to her, I need to get inside her. So far she resists me.
Working outside, planting seeds. Ray has spaded up the rose garden and it looks marvelous…. Warblers in the bushes; cedar waxwings. Catbird this morning briefly. Went for a long sunny windy walk, feeling quite good. With “Détente” off in the mail I feel airy and free and unpremeditated.
May 12, 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.
…The fascination of the doll’s house. Leaning over it. Roofless. One wall missing. A crude psychoanalytic approach would destroy the story which I want to be a parable, not a narrowly psychological work.*
[…]
May 20, 1978. Princeton. Long walk through campus.
Looked at houses (rentals) w/charming Willa Stackpole of Calloway Realtors. Depressing. One tacky, crowded place for $650; another, for the same price, owned by an egocentric professor of geology w/a grizzled beard and an awfully young, subdued wife. (He said he’d lock his “rare books” up. Seemed doubtful about us, as if he suspected we had never seen books before.)
Decided suddenly to buy a house instead of renting.
Met Richard Trenner, who befriended me by mail. Dark-haired, w/glasses, tall, attractive, about twenty-two or twenty-three, uncannily close to the person I had envisioned. How very odd…. He will be entering the doctoral program at Columbia this fall.
Dinner at Renee and Ted Weiss’s, on lovely Haslet Ave. Neighbors of Joseph Frank. Bill and Dorothy Humphrey the other guests—seemed rather hypercritical—possibly due to Bill’s relative lack of recognition as a novelist. A very pleasant evening, however. Renee is pretty, funny, warm, intelligent…Ted is extremely witty, and sweet…. Their mahogany-haired cat Hoppy is twenty yrs. old.
Exhausted by the end of this long, long day….
May 21, 1978. Taken through five houses, the most expensive (a lovely small farm outside Princeton) priced at $210,000, each very attractive in its own way. As soon as we saw the house on Honey Brook Drive we wanted it, despite the ludicrous name…. Owned by John Hunt, a director for the Institute for Advanced Study. A beautiful house, difficult to describe. Asking $163,000, which seems reasonable in this inflated market. Glass walls, modular ceiling, an atrium-courtyard, a flagstone terrace, brook and pond, innumerable trees…an elegant atmosphere altogether. Good setting for art.
Met the French poet Pierre Emmanuel, a house-guest of the Hunts (who said they “recognized” me).
Decided to buy the Honey Brook Drive house. The closing will be Sept. 1…. A delightful place to live in & furnish. Clear, clean lines, much space, airiness, light…. It isn’t unlike our Windsor house, in fact, which is probably why we bought it.
[…]
May 28, 1978.…Two very young baby birds fell out of a nest high in the evergreens; one was already dead when we found them, the other still alive though very weak…. Pathetically “unfledged.” (Not only un-feathered but, it almost seemed, unformed: when it tried to flap its scrawny wings we could see into its body, into the raw exposed flesh of its back.) The poor thing was covered with lice that ran up our forearms when we tried to feed it.
Lois’s suggestion worked for a while: egg-and-water, a kind of custard, fed to the bird every twenty minutes or so. But it died anyway. After a few hours. So many lice—! And when Ray found it dead there was a large spider on its head….
…Nature is senseless after a point. There isn’t any possible way to see it otherwise. When things go well, they go marvelously; but when something is amiss the entire universe might as well be unhinged.
[…]
…Love. Friendship. Art. Work. These are my values. Not even “community” any longer, not in this phase of civilization. (Who are our neighbors? They keep moving, we keep moving. There’s no continuity, no sense of a whole. And we’re in, after all, a country determined to see itself as foreign to the United States though in every way it is American, and linked to the American destiny. The exhibitionistic hypocrisy of Canada! Making great profits out of the Vietnam War while pretending in public to disapprove of American aggression.)
…Working for much of yesterday on “The Doll,” which is a frightening story to write, for reasons I won’t enumerate. Certain aspects of myself explored. “Ways-not-taken,” etc. And those of a close friend too, with whom I closely identify.
[…]
June 1, 1978. […] Brooding upon, thinking on, discussing (with Ray) the relationship of art to life. An old paradox. And yet. Still. Here. In art nearly everything is emblematic: if I write about a doll’s-house it isn’t simply a child’s plaything, it represents much more; if Updike chooses to write on some presumably trivial subject (golf, a professional instructor) it immediately evolves into an emblem of life and of the universe (though in this sketchy story of his it’s playful, undeveloped). (Ray, who is now taking golf lessons, looked up the Updike story to chuckle through it. “The Pro,” in Museums and Women.)…Yet in life very little is symbolic of anything. If anyone is crushed or suffocated by tons of wheat it would most likely be a totally innocent, totally uninvolved secretary or messenger boy or janitor; the wheat baron himself will die at the age of ninety-two, peacefully, or will die crushed by (let’s say) tons of frozen fish. In those instances in which the symbolic seems to spring dramatically forth from life the principle at work is probably chance. And yet: art, which seeks to mirror life in some respect, is always constructed upon meaningful symbolic relationships. It cannot not be. “Queen of the Night” can’t meander off into a fifteen-year-marriage that works out neither well nor ill…it must select, emphasize, arrange, make dramatic what in “real” life might remain forever inert.* And yet. If life is random and accidental and refuses to “arrange” itself aesthetically, what relationship has art to it at all? I think of art as a form of communication, the very highest form of communication. One soul speaking to another (as in Chopin’s music). For personal reasons I write because writing is hard work and challenge and all that…. But, still. What is the relationship? The artist imposes his vision on his material, and he necessarily distorts it because he cannot include everything; he must exclude. Rigorously. All this is a means, perhaps, to liberate his deepest self…which is a voice, a style, a rhythm. The “plot” of the novel or story is a structure upon which the writer’s voice hangs, or by which it is given its freedom. Consequently it is a pragmatic thing, a device. But much more: it is emblematic, since it is never realistic. One’s instinct is to experience the highest art in a religious sense, and this instinct though dimly understood is a wise one. As for theory…! We will let the pedants do that for us.
[…]
June 5, 1978.…Working mesmerized on “Queen of the Night.” I had wanted it short, twenty pages or so, but it can’t be short; hence it will demand its own length. Difficult to tear myself away from it.
[…]
…Piano, and “Queen of the Night,” and more piano, and the sunny courtyard, and reading. It’s difficult to imagine other ways of life, other pleasures. (Ray playing golf this morning, up early, left at 7:30.)
To live sequestered and protected in a room. The universe squeezed into a single room. Chastity: the freedom from the emotion that leads to marriage, children, family, “feminine” obligations. By this pathway Emily Dickinson created herself as a poet; by this scrupulous meanness of her life’s energies, which had to be rigorously protected so that she could write. And I am exactly th
e same: for with me the art comes first, must come first, and everything else is grouped around it, subordinate to it. If I required “neurosis” (neurotic dependencies on other, stronger people) or even psychotic flashes of inspiration or energy, I would submit to it for the sake of the writing. Because nothing else is permanent, nothing is transcendent, except art.
Dickinson, to hoard her spirit, had to remain a spinster, in seclusion. I can handle an expenditure of spirit—to some extent. But at a certain point I too would retreat, shrewdly. For one must hoard this sacred power which is like a flame that can burn intensely or flutter out….
[…]
June 7, 1978.…Writing for hours, and have finished “Queen of the Night” which frightened me, made me giddy, at the end. I will set it aside. Think about it later. Revise somewhat. But this is it, it’s set, not quite according to the outline I’d sketched….
Brutal, that story. Who wrote it…? I wrote it, am it, am infused with it. Yet it isn’t me.
…“My relationship with her has always been a perfectly serene one. I inhabit her as smoothly as a supple hand inside a glove of fine leather. There are no obvious creases or wrinkles, no crevices, interstices in which the eye might fall and grope about…. She invented a persona to accommodate me, many years ago. And she inhabits this persona as smoothly as a hand inside a glove. The persona is infinitely flexible because it has no center, no reality. It has been called, in print, in fact in a national news-magazine, ‘intensely feminine.’ This is not a lie, nor is it true…. The persona is sometimes sweet, patient, kindly, courteous, extremely interested in other people (or personae?). On the other hand it could easily be cynical, impatient, cruel, rude, and indifferent to others. It has a tendency to be witty, but the wit might slide into nihilism (the best jokers are nihilistic)…. My relationship with her has always been untroubled. This is because, I think, she does not take anything as other than fictional. She invented herself, in order to give me a free hand, a channel to the outside world. Yet she could write a paragraph or two setting forth the terms of our understanding and it would not disturb her because she would see the words as expressive of a fiction, a metaphor. She looks upon everything tolerantly, though sometimes intolerantly. She can love but cannot ‘fall in love.’ Because ‘falling in love’ demands a violent projection of the self onto an image, an object, and she understands the unconscious processes too well to fall prey to them. (Or so she thinks! But she may suffer from hubris, that most fascinating of ailments.)…She can compose the words of a fiction like ‘Queen of the Night’ in order to give dramatic structure and a substance to my inchoate strivings, and though the story is as terrifying, perhaps, as anything she has ever written, she will not really be troubled. She will think of…she will think of small technical problems…. She will retype paragraphs, pages. The labor of art becomes an end in itself so that one will not be forced to contemplate its tragic content.”
Fair enough? Ah, there are many Queens of the Night!
[…]
June 11, 1978. […] Thoughts in our summery Edenic garden: a massive three-part novel, perhaps three separate novels, Bellefleur/Mahalaleel; the first part rendered in outright fantasy (as befits a very small child’s world), the second more realistically and the third quite naturalistically, as Germaine emerges into the consciousness of an adult. I envision 1000 pages exactly. 333.3 pages to each novel. What a marvelous idea…. Plotting it out would take weeks. Writing it would take years. I could go slowly, very slowly, putting in all sorts of fanciful things, making a kind of Book of Kells, a vast tapestry…. No hurry to finish, certainly, since Vanguard has manuscripts of mine that will take me into the 80’s. But what to call it? Bellefleur. Mahalaleel.?????????
[…]
June 15, 1978. […] Long bicycle ride this afternoon, by the river. Along the bicycle path. And then east of here. These days pass as if in a dream, so idyllic, one hesitates to describe them. The mere act of setting down such things is reckless, invites trouble…fate…. One must be humble in the face of happiness; otherwise the gods are provoked….
…A flood of notes, thoughts, half-thoughts, re. Bellefleur. Cascade of ideas. Excitement mingled w/despair…for how on earth will I ever transpose the visceral sensation of the novel into prose….
(The lushness, shameless gorgeous exaggerated beauty of colors, in Matisse. The hard edges, black lines, w/their look of being lazy: arbitrary. Two-dimensional world. Colors, shapes, almost featureless faces. For Bellefleur: but of course it’s impossible. Words can’t do it, can’t be transposed. But I want it so badly…. )
…Pascal & the “thinking reed.” By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.
(But is it “the world” that is comprehended, or only the self-deceiving images of a feverish mind turned inward upon itself…. The risk, the fate, of all philosophy. Turning endlessly upon itself. Defining definitions. Words, concepts. Syntax. Art breaks through such paralysis…transcends the rigid limitations of language, what-has-gone-before…. )
Bellefleur, Bellefleur…. Mahalaleel.…It seems that I have been living with this “novel” for most of my life…but the first page hasn’t yet been written, the formal plot hasn’t yet been planned. Perhaps I am intimidated by the ambitiousness of the subject…a fear that whatever style I choose will be inadequate….
And then there is Kristin, “The Story of a Bad Girl,” which I seem to have set aside. Rereading Sentimental Education was a disturbing experience because it seemed so good, so right, so perfectly-modulated, and I wonder if I could do that again…I wonder if I could do that again….
[…]
June 17, 1978.…Idle thoughts on “The Precipice.” Reading a new Iris Murdoch novel, The Sea, The Sea, to review for TNR:* her usual meticulous prose, fascinating, fascinating simply to read, though I must admit that the character, his brooding, his voice-rhythms, are awfully familiar. (He sounds very much like Hilary of A Word Child.)
…Very nice day yesterday, my birthday. Luncheon w/Kay, Liz, and Marge. Several presents, the most striking from Kay, who seems to have spent more money than the occasion—the informality—would justify. (A gold necklace with tiny stones. Extremely attractive.) Ray surprised me with a jade ring in a gold setting. Which I certainly didn’t expect, and halfway didn’t want…since he had gotten me an opal ring not long ago…and I am uncomfortable with luxuries of this sort, pleasant enough but rather superfluous…. However…. There is the reality of the gift, my husband’s love for me, our really quite extraordinary (I suppose, I never think about it) rapport for over eighteen years; the ring is beautiful; I am wearing it now; I will continue to wear it.
…My idleness. My inclination to drift to the piano and stay there for hours. I suppose it’s another sort of reading, another kind of exploration: reading not a novel (what, after all, am I going to learn from Murdoch, when I know her work so well?—of course I admire it, that’s something quite different) but Chopin’s Preludes, brooding over them, staring, listening, contemplating. The pieces Carolyn assigns are technically tricky […] but boring musically, all surfaces, no depths, nothing jarring or arresting. So I spend hours sight-reading pieces that are beyond my technical skill, but it doesn’t upset me, it doesn’t seem to matter in the slightest…. This year, my fortieth birthday, the election to the American Academy, the publication of Son of the Morning, some sort of watershed, a sense of tranquility, rest, balance.
[…]
June 24, 1978.…What strange, exhausting images the unconscious mind forces upon us…. Woke this morning after an extraordinarily painful, distressing dream; lay without being able to move for ten or fifteen minutes; when at last I went to the bathroom to wash my face I saw that I had aged ten years; deep indentations around the eyes, two odd severe lines on the left side of my mouth, other perverse defiant lines on my cheeks…. I stared in dismay at this worn, sallow face, a mask I detested and could not accept, and felt for a moment such a sense of…of giddi
ness, unreality, dislike of what constitutes reality….
…Now, 10:30 A.M. after a long shower, after having shampooed my hair, I feel and look exactly as I always do. There is no sign. And the dream is rapidly fading. It must be like those legendary birth pains, which are so terrible and yet cannot be recalled afterward. Unless of course the body, the body’s tissues, recall them.
…Spent yesterday morning and most of the afternoon reading & rereading Murdoch, and writing my little essay-review on The Sea, The Sea and her work in general. Feel fairly satisfied with it though I should have very much liked to work in her stirring, elegiac, rather beautiful poem “Agamemnon Class, 1939.” When a writer is so uneven as Murdoch it’s necessary, and only fair, to concentrate on her best work. Unfortunately the review had to be of The Sea, The Sea, which obviously isn’t her best work; so I tried to say things about Henry and Cato, A Word Child, etc.
…The betrayal of Murdoch’s vision by the rowdy Restoration-comedy atmosphere of her settings. The ponderous introspective style, which should signal a certain kind of novel, betrayed by the determinedly superficial nature of her plots. Why?
…Shall I record the exact images of that dream? But I hate to.
The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates Page 30
