January 1, 1979.…Have just returned from a lovely luncheon at Bob and Lynn Fagles’, on Lambert Drive, about five minutes away: good conversation about everything from films to music to Dostoyevsky (with Joe Frank)* to Anthony Burgess (the most hilarious tales are told of him here—he’d been in the Creative Writing Program a few years ago)…. I like Bob Fagles enormously and feel a certain kinship, difficult to explain. […]
…Despite the concentration of social life I’ve been able to work on the novel, intermittently, and should begin tomorrow…the chapter “Haunted Things.”…Wrote a review of Stanislaw Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum (translated from the Polish)*…a Borgesian sort of book, reviews of sixteen non-existent books…rather more exciting in theory than in reality. But it was pleasant to do a book review, after the almost unrelieved intensity of Bellefleur, which can leave me somewhat drained.
[…] I have a certain reluctance about entering a social round…such as I sense here…. One part of me is repulsed, another part is halfway charmed: I catch myself day-dreaming while others converse in their bright, lively way (they are so aggressively cheerful, some of them), and wonder why I’m there, why I haven’t remained home, immersed in Bellefleur. I’ve never been in so social an environment as Princeton, and wonder if I will survive…. And then of course I begin to feel guilty, for there are a number of dinners I haven’t requited, and probably never will; I simply haven’t the energy, nor have I the skill as a hostess and cook. (Nor do I want that particular sort of skill. Life is too short to waste it on such things!)
January 4, 1979.…Quiet, dark, rather chilly house. Empty. (Ray is in New York City.) The idyllic nature of silence. Here, at my desk, for hours, since about 8:30 this morning (and now it is 7:30), utterly engrossed with the serpentine coils of language that constitute Bellefleur. To experience language minute after minute…the arabesques of language…to utter sentences and phrases aloud (and some of these sentences are ambitiously long)…to feel something spring to life…something indefinable, uncalculable….
…Flaubert & the desire to write a novel about “nothing.” Held together by the strength of its style.
…How could anything, even the most dazzling content, interest the writer more than the precise flow of language, the peculiar exhausting tyrannical arabesques a certain voice demands…? (Though I would not want to say so, in an interview. For it strikes the ear of the non-writer unpleasantly. Art for art’s sake, etc. But there is art only for its own sake. What is done for the sake of something else may be skillful, professional, extremely interesting…but it isn’t art. And it won’t satisfy in the creator the hunger for art’s creation.)
[…]
…Beckett: Failure, not success, interests me.
…Failure excites pity, but also a sense of kinship. Despite my presumed “success” I identify far more readily with outsiders, losers, failures, rejects, misfits, “freaks” than with the successful; which leads me to conclude that everyone does (with the possible exception of the frankly unfortunate, who must desperately identify with—want to identify with—success). As I am, so I assume others are. As I probe my own mind (especially on these days of solitude, with Ray gone, and the house so unusually silent, whatever I discover must relate to everyone. For I’m not a remarkable person. Only, perhaps, keenly interested in how we are constituted, why we behave as we do).
[…]
January 5, 1979.…Lovely bright cold dry day, a Friday. Drove to New Hope and then north on 32, along the Delaware River; swung around at Frenchtown and returned; had a late lunch at the Center Bridge Inn, a “quaint” but delightful place on the river; talked of innumerable things. (After yesterday, a single day apart, Ray and I seem to have a great many things to talk about…. The magazine; our Princeton social life (which threatens to swell out of control); our Windsor/Detroit friends (some of whom […] are having a bad winter); upcoming plans for New York.)
[…]
…Working, as usual, on Bellefleur. Intercalated Christopher Newman from James’s The American, in Jean-Pierre’s chapter “The Innisfail Butcher.” The writing, which is really storytelling, goes smoothly. Now on. Goldie and Garth’s wedding. Still feel, occasionally, a kind of mild anxiety over the length of the novel…its massive and perhaps quixotic ambition…. What if something happens and I can’t finish it, the usual silly phantom-terrors, not to be taken seriously; yet every writer—I suppose every creative artist—feels them.
[…]
January 16, 1979.…Cold, sunny, quiet, idyllic days. Working on Bellefleur as usual; reading, in the evenings, before the fire (Ray reading Garry Wills’ The Inventing of America, I reading James’s The American—delightful of course, but rather stretched-out), the kittens scurrying about or sleeping on my lap. How odd it is, that everything I do (or nearly everything) seems to me exactly right. And it worries me to think that these quiet simple domestic unexceptional things might so very easily be brushed aside, and events more dramatic sought out in their place.
…Proceeding with Bellefleur. Slowly, as usual; yet I suppose since I’ve written 450 pages since Sept. 24 I can’t have gone as slowly as it seems. (This peculiar disjointed time-experience is one of the subjects of the novel. How my working time feels as if it were protracted, as if I were, sometimes, crawling on my hands and knees…but, evidently, measured objectively, I write “quickly.”…I will never comprehend the mystery of this…of whatever it is!…this queer unfathomable teasing paradox…. How others evidently view me, and how I view myself.)
…My sense that my grasp of time is the correct one. For how could it be otherwise, since it is my own, and “time” can only be experienced subjectively? (It is measured objectively, and experienced subjectively. But of course the two dimensions really ought to coincide.)
[…]
…Bellefleur, quite the oddest thing I’ve ever done. And so I pursue it, its image, “chapter” after chapter. What it is, how alarming, how fragmented, insane, I scarcely want to know…. Relief, when it’s finished: or so I imagine. I don’t think I will miss it the way I missed Son of the Morning. Or the others. Writing about so many people, treating a number of them quite deliberately as “fictitious characters” in a novel, a story, a narrative-dominated story, keeps me at a distance. Even with Vernon and Raphael…. I wonder how it will strike me, when I’ve finished. Certainly it feels, it sounds, as I proceed, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and “chapter” by chapter, as close to perfect as I can make it. But there are different rhythms, different expectations. My problem is too fertile an imagination, so that each of the chapters (meant originally to be prose-poems organized around an image) has become much longer than I’d intended…and so it goes, and so…and so it goes….
…No short stories for months. No poems. A few reviews. But nothing else: for everything is swallowed in Bellefleur. I wake, I begin to work as early as possible, stagger from the study exhausted (on a “good” day) at sunset…at dark…to begin dinner around seven…usually having finished one of the little chapters; but not always, not invariably, feeling the kind of release I might hope to feel. The novel gathers force, has become a kind of dark voracious current, bearing me along, so that I no sooner finish one unit (the “Noir Vulture”) than I am planning, plotting, trying out voice rhythms, for the next. […]
January 20, 1979.…Dreary cold snowflurry-riddled day. Grateful for the quiet, the solitude, after the busyness of this week.
…Tea at the Russian Tea Room with Gail [Godwin]. Like the inside of a candy box: pink, white, pink-and-scarlet-and-white, brass fixtures, “impressionist”-romantic paintings, ornate fixtures. Gail looking very good, very attractive. (A mirrorish image of my own face, my own features—so I halfway thought. Do we resemble each other, or is it my imagination? Our curly hair, brown eyes, the set of our bones…. No? Yes? I really can’t say.) Talking of her friend John Irving. Talking of last year’s Breadloaf conference, and John Gardner’s odd behavior. Son of the Morning, which she (very kindly) seem
ed to think was impressive; deeply moving; convincing. (But you must have had experiences like that yourself…? she asked.) Discussing our editors; our domestic lives; what we’ve been reading lately.
[…]
January 25, 1979.…Pitiless weather: rain, snow, overcast skies. After the furnace broke down, and after it was repaired, how marvelous it felt, simply to be warm again…warm, cozy, lazy, idle, reading & writing & petting the kittens. But of course that’s but a part, the daylight part, of my strange life.
…The “strangeness” never increases, nor does it ebb. A sense, remarkably convincing, at certain times, that we inhabit a body or a vehicle simultaneously with another self or spirit, which comes alive (so to speak—in fact it is always alive) when consciousness fades. This “other” self is, or is not, a deeper and more profound self. It’s impossible to say that one prefers it to consciousness, for one doesn’t know it.
…The crudeness of the concept of “schizophrenia.” But how crude, really, are most psychological/clinical terms. Like trying to weed an herb garden with an ax. “Schizophrenia”: split self. But all selves are split, at least in consciousness, while we are awake and lucid. A seamless self, not split, would be pure infant, pure psychotic inchoate being.
…The dream as art-work. In some respects more clever, more ingenious, than consciousness; in other respects more primitive. One requires both. One is never free of both. But now one pole tugs, and now another…so the pendulum swings from side to side…a highly “conscious” art, an “unconscious” art…. If we prefer one, very shortly we prefer another. Nothing is permanent.
…Eighteenth anniversary on Tuesday. We drove out to Bucks County, lovely countryside, an almost preternatural afternoon of sunshine (these days it rains 3/4 of the time), luncheon at an old inn, Plumsteadville. Lately I’ve been more conscious than usual of being in love with my husband…but that sounds awkward…I mean of watching him, observing, valuing, cherishing…. He is an extraordinary person, in a number of respects: his kindness, his good nature, his sense of humor, his wit (which is so rarely shown in public), his reserve, shyness, intelligence…sweetness…. That he should be so sweet, and that I should have guessed so, eighteen years ago, what a miracle…. Because when I fell in love I couldn’t possibly have known what love was; I simply became infatuated.
[…]
…The dream as art. Art created for its own sake, its own pleasure. No ponderous Freudian overtones, no meaning at all. Could this be possible, could this be the organizing principle behind the extraordinary phenomena we experience every night…? Joy of creating; joy of problem-solving; inventing; imagining. So images and stories are produced by the dreaming mind, as naturally as we breathe.
…Bellefleur, my waking dream. I suspect that I will miss this novel immensely once I’m finished…I will miss its exuberant shameless playfulness. For of course I can never write it again.
February 6, 1979.…Dazzling sunny days. Working on Bellefleur in the mornings, then to the University; luncheon at Prospect; a sense of well-being. Reading, in the evenings, for The Best American Short Stories 1979*…the finest story thus far is Bellow’s “A Silver Dish,” a masterpiece, so powerful it left me somewhat upset for a while afterward. (Thinking of death. Specific deaths, that is. Inevitable, terrible. That was the way he was, Bellow says, doubtless talking about his own father.)
…The power of literature to shatter one’s peace of mind. To enter irrevocably into one’s own life.
[…]
…Bellefleur, Bellefleur. My obsession these days. No sooner do I finish one little chapter (today, “Mt. Ellesmere”) than my mind leaps ahead to the next. Though I should like some rest between them, and I will have some rest…. Page 597. And still a considerable story yet to unfold.
[…]
February 10, 1979.…Finished my selections for The Best American Short Stories 1979. Now to let the stories settle in my mind, and write the introduction in a week or two. A most challenging and pleasant and rewarding project. The Bellow story continues to stand out, and several others. Lovely, the “short story.” As divine a form as any other.
…Snowbound on Wednesday, so no reading at Trenton State College as planned. No class either at Princeton. Thursday, our luncheon meeting canceled, stayed at home working on the novel. Hour after hour after hour. I don’t believe I have ever saturated myself so thoroughly, so tirelessly, in any material. The Bellefleurs stride around in my imagination, quite boldly, even ruthlessly. But their convoluted, tortuous (indeed, torturous) tale will soon be concluded.
…Working on Violet’s little chapter, “The Clavichord.” It goes rather painfully. Like trying to get a sliver out of my finger…. Am now on or thereabouts.
[…]
…White-tailed deer. One of them, a fawn, with a pronounced limp. Snow. Ice on the pond, covered irregularly by snow. A mind casting back and forth, like a net. What will I catch? What will I myself be caught in? Haven’t written poetry, or short fiction, for so long. Even this journal is difficult to turn to, with Bellefleur drawing me in. The pleasant thing about an obsession is that it channels all one’s obsessive energies so that nothing is left over. I note in myself, this year, an increased gravitation toward writing. There is almost a physical pull, a tugging…to get to this study, to this desk. But why? Whyever? I know enough, I am intellectually mature enough, to understand that I need not write; or do anything. I am free, I am self-determined, I am not here on earth merely to create books…ever more complicated lurid garish plots…. […]
February 19, 1979.…A dusk of heart-stopping beauty. The evergreens are heavy with snow and everything is a languorous blue; and very cold. Mounds, heaps, piles, clumps of snow everywhere. Like waves, frozen waves. Very beautiful. (Today we were snowbound. I couldn’t get to the University for my class.)
…Bellefleur, Bellefleur. The abyss into which I plunge. It is eating away at my heart! A vampirous creation. Feeding it, daily, I am necessarily feeding myself—or am I? “These fragments I have set against my ruin.” Page by page by page. So laboriously hammered out, no one would believe…! By 3:30 this afternoon I was exhausted and could very happily have slept. But played piano for two hours and felt totally renewed…and then have been reading Mike’s Cavafy translations in the original book Six Poets of Modern Greece.
[…]
February 24, 1979.…Cold, wet, miserable, with a sore throat, having just returned from New York City. Pouring rain. Impossible to get a cab. The train delayed. The parking lot at Princeton Junction a quagmire. Stayed overnight at the Algonquin—tacky, rather silly. The “literary” hotel! But then literary folks haven’t much taste, or money…. If only I could keep in mind the various minor miseries of this visit: if only they wouldn’t be forgotten within hours, as a consequence of my tiresome resiliency. I would really like never to take that train again, or tramp about New York again. Dirty streets, gutters filled with debris, ugly sights, the usual brain-damaged or demented people, etc., etc., but why bother to enumerate the horrors….
And yet: a marvelous evening with Hortense Calisher and Curt Harnack, in their beautiful apartment (Victorian antiques, many paintings, an 1816 Broadwood piano which Hortense herself evidently plays), 205 W. Fifty-seventh St. Irving Howe there also: he seemed rather tired, spoke dispiritedly of his unprepared and unenthusiastic students at City University.* I had been looking forward to meeting him, but…but there wasn’t much sense of a distinctive personality, a man of letters, a writer with his own specific vision…. Perhaps he simply was tired.
[…]
…Luncheon at Entre Nous with Henry Robbins, Blanche, Ray. How much I like Henry! It disturbed me to learn from [Michael] Arlen that he’d had a heart attack some years ago. And evidently he lives alone…? Was divorced? Sensitive, widely-read, soft-spoken, sweet, intelligent, ah what an ideal editor…what an ideal person.
[…]
March 6, 1979. […] Query: Is the isolated artist, the person who doesn’t love anyone, isn’t marrie
d, or isn’t at any rate successfully married, haunted by dreams of normality…? I mean, does he or she resent the ostensibly “normal,” and consider the artistic life something of a heroic (or involuntary) sacrifice? To balance “normality” and “the extraordinary” isn’t so difficult as one might think, from within. But I suppose it’s like wanting money when you haven’t any, or wanting someone to love you when no one’s available or interested…one tends to value what is absent, and exaggerate its worth. “High-Wire Artist”:* an exaggeration of certain tendencies I see in myself and others. To wish to be isolated (that is, “superior”)…but at the same time to suffer a diminution of one’s humanity…. The more intensely one’s spirit is poured into one’s work, the less intensely life itself can be lived; for even if there’s a spirit remaining there certainly isn’t time. And yet…! The high-wire act beckons. It is only on the high wire that life (seen from a great distorted distance) attains its curious sentimental worth, being out of reach. One’s pulses hum on the high wire, one cannot be less than painfully alert for an instant.
[…]
March 13, 1979.…Life plunges in a torrent past me. Today, yesterday, tomorrow: too many people; and always the tug of Bellefleur, my center of gravity.
The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates Page 34
