The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates

by Joyce Carol Oates

  …On one side of the looking-glass one tries to create himself. An almost Sartrean project. (“I choose to be a hero. I choose to be an Olympic diver. I choose to be a novelist. I choose to be a high-wire artist.” Etc., forever.) Then life, day by day, is an attempt to answer the terms of that project; an attempt on the individual’s part to grow into it. Very sensibly. However—one can look at it from another angle, or from the other side of the looking-glass. I am Joyce Carol Oates and this, this, and this are happening to me; innumerable things have happened; my own (strenuous?) activities are in a sense things that have happened to me; so if I observe carefully (and this journal stimulates careful, relentless observation) all this…this galaxy of bits…I will come to some idea of who I am, after all. Not as a project, a willed phenomenon…but as a creation of some sort (a creation impersonal as anything in Nature). The one exalts the will, the other undervalues it.

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  August 15, 1978. […] A temptation, to immerse oneself in journal-writing. To speak directly and frankly and bluntly, without the intermediary voices, the diffusion of energies. But the fallacy is, of course, that I can’t speak of myself because I don’t know myself; the fallacy is, also, that art is always superior to “frankness,” especially in diary form, because, being art, it pulls up into consciousness what would remain buried if one were simply recording one’s thoughts in a book. […] The Invisible Woman. A title for this journal I have just decided upon. Since I feel myself “invisible” so often. In small domestic ways as well as the larger, more obvious ones.

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  …Virginia Woolf, the “sensibility” she felt when alone and thinking and writing; the pull into “Virginia Woolf, Leonard’s wife, Nessa’s sister” etc., when others came into her presence. Evidently she was a gregarious, lively woman at times; at other times deeply melancholic, inert. I seem to have neither talent. Extremes don’t attract me. My “manic state” is one in which I telephone a friend, or plan a party, or decide impulsively to go out shopping—but then I don’t, I decide I don’t want to shop after all, how boring—my “depressive state” is one in which I decide not to write but simply to read for an evening. So my emotional temperature is always the same. It hardly varies five degrees…! The only things that can deeply wound me have been, and will be, blows coming from people close to me—or, more specifically, blows as a consequence of others’ illnesses, deaths. Some years ago I was more “emotional” but even then, I suppose, it hardly counted for much […] Placid & self-contained & not easily swayed; inclined toward skepticism (which is often hidden, in public, by a willful idealism); introspective; rarely lonely; ceaselessly curious; as bored as Woolf by the “racket of life” but never as violently repulsed by it as Woolf…. “Yet you must have these violent emotions in you, because you write about them so convincingly,” Evelyn said last night on the phone, and I did not contradict her, I murmured some vague sort of assent; but the “emotions” released in conscious, disciplined art are hardly the “emotions” Evelyn means, when she speaks of her own bad temper, her impatience.

  …So I see myself harshly as an impostor. Less harshly, as a person who has somehow managed to balance inner and outer worlds, not cheating either—but favoring, in terms of survival, the outer world—by which I mean what Flaubert meant—the ordinariness of a sane, routine, domestic, cared-for life, in which energies are tenderly cultivated, never dissipated. One might mistake this for strategy, for shrewdness, but in fact it is simply a temperamental thing. Character is fate…fate experienced in small chunks.

  September 3, 1978.…So many uncharted, unrecalled days: the chaos of moving, of driving long merciless distances: one’s mind jumbled and blank and blown about: the ambivalence of not knowing whether the adventure will be worth the psychic upheaval, the cost in wasted & irretrievable hours. Still, we do these things; and though it’s exhausting the move seems to us supremely worth it.

  …A wild, lovely woods, mainly second-growth trees; shrubs, bushes, ferns, miscellaneous weed flowers; a pond & surrounding marshy area (many frogs, noisy creatures); Sunday afternoon sunshine slanting across the terrace (where Ray is sitting, reading Dylan Thomas); the house nearly empty since our furniture isn’t here yet…we’re living with a handsome redwood table (bought for $30 at a Princeton furniture store), a sofa bed, a few chairs. [The previous owners] left this house surprisingly dirty; we spent a day and a half cleaning, and not much enjoying the experience. […] We went out & bought useless attractive items: many hanging plants, a bird bath, even a parakeet. A piano (Baldwin console) to be delivered next Thursday…. Plants, gifts, arrived welcoming us from several people including Richard Trenner; Willa Stackpole sent a surprisingly costly present—a box of six bottles of French champagne (unfortunate, that neither Ray nor I drinks champagne). Days pass w/working-and service-people arriving; shopping at the Quaker Bridge Mall or the Princeton Shopping Center (how weary it is, how much I am bored with this sort of thing…does one care about curtains, curtain-rods, rugs for halls, tables in strategic places…?); driving about the utterly charming countryside looking (in vain) for a nearby grocery store, gas station, etc. We are quite far out from Princeton, in marvelous seclusion; the lot is wide & deep & densely wooded; I could stay here forever. The prospect of actually teaching in two weeks leaves me blank.

  …A certain self-consciousness on my part in Princeton. Imagining that people look at me oddly, as if half-recognizing me. “Are you Joyce Carol Oates?” a young, nicely-dressed man asked; he turned out to be Reginald Gibbons, who will be a colleague of mine in the Creative Writing Dept., and whose story we published in Ontario Review a while back. A friend of Bob’s also. We had a pleasant conversation on busy Nassau Street…. “Excuse me, but are you Joyce Carol Oates?” asked a man who appeared to be in his forties, with a Southern accent (or somewhat Southern, I’m not sure), in the fresh produce department of the A & P. He turned out to be the poet Charles Wright, who is evidently going to be a colleague of mine also; he and his wife, like us, have just arrived in Princeton. […] And today, a walk in this neighborhood, which is very secluded, leafy, private. If only I felt more invigorated, if only I could get to my writing…. But a gnat-like busyness afflicts me. There is simply so much to be done and thought about in connection with a move like this, I find that I would rather, lazily, make lists of dull tedious trivial chores than think of Bellefleur….

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  September 6, 1978. […] A kind of paradise here. Despite the dirty windows, the clatter of the typewriter in the enormous empty room, the innumerable vexing chores we are faced with daily. (Acquiring a telephone. Explaining re. the mail. Buying chairs, rugs, tables, etc., some of which can’t be delivered for four weeks. The vexations of moving are prodigious. I don’t want to move again: I can’t think of moving again. We’ve had some really bad moments…feeling completely exhausted, defeated…and all because of trivia…an avalanche of trivia. This is the sort of domestic thing I am shielded from most of the time, having lived so settled a life.) […] I don’t want to move again. I want to stay here permanently.

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  September 11, 1978. […] Am thinking about “The Haunted House” but can’t quite make myself begin.* The upheaval of the past two weeks, the excitement of today, this clattering typewriter in an almost-empty room (thank God the piano arrived, and is such a beautiful piece of furniture, so lovely to play—to touch), the difficulty of making simple meals, the enormous difficulty of making complex meals (tonight I must try shrimp curry; the other evening I made chicken with broccoli, and other vegetables)…. Despite my even temperament, and the newlywedness of the situation, the move has been a strain; I can’t deny it. I had thought to insist to myself that everything go smoothly…but life isn’t that easy. So we are still awaiting our furniture, still living half out of closets, with things on the floor, in odd untidy piles…and I keep wanting to write, to return to Bellefleur or at least some poems or “The Haunted House”…but a kind of demon keeps me jumping a
bout; now this chore, now that: everything designed to exhaust me, and to add up to fairly little. Mike Keeley spoke ominously of everyone at the University being “overworked”—I hope he isn’t serious.†

  …If only there were more time. More time. How I long for the feeling (which I haven’t had in years) of restlessness, of boredom…. I can’t remember what it was like, to be bored; to not feel that time was passing almost wildly. It will be a grave misfortune if the rest of my life is like this….

  September 19, 1978.…The exhilaration of autumn! Classes began yesterday (though quietly, unlike Windsor: I met only my workshop, at 1:30, and talked with them for an hour, and that was that; and today I meet a more advanced workshop; and tomorrow yet another; and my first “week” will be over effortlessly). So much seems to have been happening emotionally….

  The uprootedness of the past several weeks. With the consequence that I began to feel myself thinning…my soul, my imagination, my energy…. In short it’s simply a failure of energy: and then one’s vision is truncated, everything seems too much, too ponderous, weighty: one can be defeated by a trifle. (Indeed I did grow rather more thin, for a while; began to feel unpleasantly wraith-like.) But it’s such a temporary thing…. Despair, the exhaustion of despair: a failure of imagination. Atrophying of imagination. If only I can remember this….

  The virtues of a journal. Paring back experience to the emotional and psychological core. Retaining what might otherwise be glossed over…. I told my students yesterday that if they are attentive to details, in their journal entries, meaning will probably follow; and that what seems of paramount importance to them now won’t be important in the future, but will be replaced by another, more humble level of reality: physical details surrounding their lives, etc. The ability to call back, to re-vision, the past.

  All experience is potentially art. There is no art without experience, though there may certainly be experience without art.

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  October 20, 1978.…A flurry of days, a flood of people, and why, and what, to what purpose….

  Last night, reading “work-in-progress” at PEN. A comfortable, informal setting, friendly people, enthusiasm & applause. Why it leaves me so unmoved, so indifferent, I can’t say. Am I losing interest in my career, in “Joyce Carol Oates”?

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  …Friendly smiling Don Barthelme and his new wife, inviting us back for a drink. But we had to catch a train. I was appalled to see Don there since I know he doesn’t like my work. Go away, I said, you don’t want to hear this bad stuff…. Earlier, at a reception at the NYU Institute for the Humanities, I met and liked very much Susan Sontag—warm, friendly, unpretentious, an attractive woman in a stark, dramatic way, with her long, thick, shoulder-length hair going gunmetal gray, and her frank, lined face, her dark eyes, engaging smile. She gave me her telephone number and expressed the hope that we might get together sometime, which I would like also; though she somewhat intimidates me with her liking for intellectual combat. That sort of thing seems, as the years pass, so clearly a kind of…filling-in-of-time…a thing one person does in order to impress himself upon others, who are doing similar things, though perhaps with less success. Ah, but that’s not very clear, really….

  …Bellefleur at the back of my mind. “At my back I always hear” some sort of chariot, it hardly matters which one. Am I simply very exhausted, spiritually…physically too? (Arrived home on Wednesday from one of those marathon days at Princeton. Conferences, a workshop, yet another conference—late, 5:15 and the young man clearly didn’t want to leave, stayed talking about non-literary matters until 5:45 and my head pounded with pain and I felt so terribly weak, so cold […] that when he did leave (oh God he wanted to “walk” me to my car!—to continue our wearying discussion even longer!) I telephoned Ray…had to tell him that I wasn’t sure I could even drive home, I felt so sick, so close to extinction. It sounds absurd, and on this pleasant sunny Friday morning when I have hours ahead of my own it sounds faintly incredible…. So close to extinction. But what does that mean? It doesn’t “mean” anything clearly, it can only be felt, experienced. I just felt so utterly hopelessly helplessly sick.

  …(And came home here, and went immediately to bed. Though I couldn’t sleep I warmed up, and after an hour felt strong enough to get up, and we had dinner, and my appetite returned…and so, and so. The days tumble over one another. This entry isn’t meant as a complaint, exactly; more a simple recording of an eerie state of mind, or body. Alas, one simply cannot help exhaustion…the wearing-out of the spirit…a vague, troubling sense of malaise. My happiness is all at home here, with Ray, quietly reading or preparing dinner or writing at this desk, staring out at the lovely woods, and a great flock of birds (starlings?) at this very moment flying through the trees. And playing piano too. And simply thinking, meditating.) But this is a paradise hard to come by.

  October 27, 1978. […] Lovely days. Working on Bellefleur in the morning, and then driving to Princeton; working in the evening if I’m not too exhausted; bicycle-riding whenever we can, and walking, one windy sunny morning on the grounds of the Institute for Advanced Study, through their woods. And seeing people: a superb evening with Walter and Hazel Kaufmann (she’s a beautiful, gracious, charming woman) and Stanley Kunitz (whom I like more all the time).* Talk of Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt (whom neither Walter nor Stanley thought much of), Princeton, poetry, mutual acquaintances. People do seem somewhat overly critical of one another here…which makes me wonder, uneasily, what on earth they must say about me behind my back…! For assuredly they do say something, and I rather doubt that it can all be nice.

  …Odd pleasures. Solitary driving, walking. Strolling through campus. Reading magazines & journals in Firestone Library yesterday. Going to the English Dept. party for undergraduates (where I spent most of the time talking to Mike Keeley, who is sweet, unpretentious, amiable, charming, perhaps too amiable, since people tend to underrate him; and Carol Rosen, a young assistant professor who teaches courses in English and drama)…. Picked Ray up at the train station, 10:30 P.M. Then back here for a delicious snack-dinner of hamburgers on pita buns, and several cheeses…for which I was famished, not having eaten since breakfast. And so the days go, the same day goes, seemingly the same, rolling toward me and then past me, never ceasing to amaze….

  …Growing older. Growing old. I rather suspect, judging from myself, that no one, however intelligent, expects it. Or can quite grasp it. Certainly everyone knows that his face will age…there will be, there must be, lines, wrinkles, disappointing pouches…yet do we really expect them? Do we comprehend them?

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  …Bellefleur, Bellefleur. Writing for hours yesterday, lovely uninterrupted intense exhausting marvelous fruitful hours, hours. And today I feel free, and very cheerful. Except, a sobering thought: I am already and my heroine hasn’t gotten herself born.

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  November 4, 1978.…Intending to begin work on Bellefleur very early this morning, I unaccountably did not…and at the moment, at this moment, it is 6:30 P.M. and pitch-black and I have done nothing; or almost nothing; and well….

  …Along Aunt Molley’s Road this morning we saw a kitten: white-faced, with gray spots on an ear and part of its forehead. And then another appeared, almost identically marked. Two abandoned kittens, about five weeks old. Mewing hungrily. Showing absolutely no fear of me. Since there were no houses for miles, and the kittens were obviously abandoned, there was nothing else to do but bring them home and feed them and…and all afternoon Molly and Muffin have been sleeping on my lap (as I read Updike’s rather clotted, dense, Nabokovian, but excellent The Coup, and listened to Chopin’s fifty-one mazurkas, of which I am deeply moved by almost too many of them…particularly the last one he wrote, his farewell to the piano itself…. Awkward grammar but no matter; it’s late, dinner must be prepared, I haven’t approached Bellefleur—the chapter “Horses”—I feel both giddy and guilty, lazy and harassed)…sleeping and then waking and biting
and rolling about, and being fed (warmed milk and cat food soaked in milk), and scratching energetically in their kitty litter, which they’ve taken to with admirable alacrity. (Perhaps their shrewd chromosomes have absorbed the meaning and uses of litter itself…. )

  …Much is going on, elsewhere. I suppose I will be leaving Vanguard. Do I feel regret?—uneasiness?—guilt? I do, I certainly do. Yet why, I don’t really know. Vanguard did reject my most recent novel, in a graceful, oblique way. The Evening and the Morning was too “experimental” for them. Yes. And so, I could shelve it; or give it to John Martin. And then the new contract, with its grudging, minimal terms, exactly the same terms offered (and accepted) five years ago…no accounting for inflation, for my (ostensible) growth, even for such obvious public honors as the American Academy and Institute election. Vanguard, by being so mean, so economic-minded, gambled and lost…for I believe I will be going to Dutton, to Henry Robbins (whom Joan Didion has called “the best editor in America”). The contract will be for five books, the same five, but the terms will be much higher […]. I hadn’t any choice, really…. But still…. Still. My affection for Evelyn is very real. It has been fifteen years, after all. (I keep asking myself why they rejected the novel so bluntly, without even suggesting revisions; why they refused to offer as much as $1000 more than the old contract…. Were they thinking simply of saving money? Obviously my indifference to money for so long, and my modesty or backwardness or—or whatever!—allowed them to think that they could always deal with me without complications…. Spoke to Henry Robbins on the phone the other day; he seems awfully nice, and enthusiastic too. He would like to “immerse” himself in my writing….