…“We learn, as the thread plays out, that we belong/Less to what flatters us than to what scars”—Kunitz, “The Dark and the Fair.”
June 10, 1979. […] The imposition of a structure upon the looseness, fluidity, spontaneity of life. This is the artistic impulse, but also the religious impulse. In religion it can be disastrous—a denial of life itself. In art—? “But one must come to earth somewhere!” the protest goes…. The thematic usefulness of Marya Knauer. Who isn’t, of course, myself. But has shared certain experiences. If I were to imagine myself as Marya (as I might once have done) I would now be a quite different person…. The strength required to be weak, at times; to be passive. No one speaks of such things. A certain cowardliness, fear, underlies the need to be always in control, always “strong.” (Like Marya.)
…Life the immense wheel, grinding, moving. Rolling. Placid as a cow chewing its cud. I curl back upon myself, discover earlier selves—the same thoughts—the same revelations! Touching home always, this central core: simplicity: harmony: the doubleness of myself and my husband: a unity that can’t be spoken of, it goes so deep. (Yet when the Paris Review queried about my emotional stability, for the interview, and I replied, something to do with my marriage, with Ray, it was eventually cut from the interview…as if anything so normal or so “positive” wouldn’t have been of interest to their readers.)
…The “secret”…which sometimes feels awkward as a hammer stuck in my pocket, getting in my way…at other times small and contained and indeed unobtrusive as a tiny pebble…something foreign to me, yet carried about by me, invisible. I once thought the two or three selves in combat would be resolved, and one would triumph—and the worry of the secret—or whatever I must call it—would dissolve. But this hasn’t happened. It won’t happen.
[…]
June 14, 1979.…Almost too much is happening: Monday, a lovely luncheon with Stanley Kunitz and his wife Elise Archer, 37 W. 12th St., about which I must write in more detail; and then a visit to Elise’s studio on 15th St. (she is quite a fine artist). That evening, a poetry reading at the Public Theater: the dramatization of my story “Daisy,” by actors (and superb actors they were) for the first half, and my reading the second half: and it seemed to go well. So—no more poetry readings until October!
…Yesterday, a long hike on the canal towpath, north of Rocky Hill. Though we were both feeling somewhat groggy after Monday’s exhaustion. (We didn’t get to bed until three, got up fairly early. New York is always exhausting…. )
…Finished “The Cure for Folly,” revisions, etc., and mailed out to Blanche; but now my mind is stuck on “Presque Isle”*…haven’t been able to write a sentence…. Am reading Sholem Aleichem’s stories, for NY Times review;† and Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer (which seems somewhat less intense, less interesting, than his usual fiction); Mavis Gallant’s From the Fifteenth District (not terribly good—though Gallant is always professional, competent, deft, wise); and a new Brian Moore which reminds me, at least at the outset, of Ginger Coffey.
…Today, a prodigious four hours: Gail Godwin, Robert Starer, Ed Cone, George Pitcher for luncheon:‡ and I’m still reeling at the way Ed Cone played three preludes…Chopin preludes…the First, Second, and Seventeenth…. My God, the way he tackled the first!…we all just sat there, and Robert and I exchanged a look of amused alarm…. Gail looking charming in white slacks, a purple sweater, sunglasses. George whom I like immensely, and with whom (perhaps because he is a philosopher by “profession”) I find it very easy to talk. I served Stanley Kunitz’s 10-surprise soup as a first course; chicken curry on fresh pineapple, with nuts; and a fruit salad sprinkled over with rum and lemon juice; and all went well—fortunately I didn’t worry beforehand, as I suppose I should have at the prospect of having Ed and George to lunch (they are gourmet cooks, alas). I felt my piano’s inadequacy, and heard a slight squeaking about the pedal, but Ed assured me it didn’t bother him…it certainly didn’t seem to.
…A lovely day, absolutely lovely. After our guests left (I didn’t want them to leave, but it was 3:20 or so) we couldn’t get back to work, and so went to Hopewell on errands, and walked about briskly for an hour, talking over the party, the conversations. George’s interest in “the rights of animals”…Ed and Robert on music news…mutual acquaintances…and we talked generally about music, the notion of genius, gardens, herbs, birds (Ed is an expert on birds)…. Now it is 7 P.M. and the sun is setting languidly and I have been at my desk doodling, half-thinking, brooding, wondering what on earth next, how can I make anything sensible out of “Presque Isle”…all I have, really, is the name, and a few scribbled notes. Nice letter from Greg Johnson, a kind of soul mate. Wrote a long letter to Lois, whom I miss—how beautifully she would have fit in here this afternoon! Thinking of Marya—Marya—Marya—so close to me, yet so completely antithetical—I really am Marya—yet of course I’m not at all like her and never was like her—ah, that hardness of heart—yet her sullen passion, too, goes beyond my own. Or so I think…. To bring Marya to Princeton is my aim, but I must go about it carefully. Unassimilated experience cannot be transcribed into fiction…one must wait, one must wait, wait….
June 16, 1979.…Forty-first birthday: a long leisurely drive to Pipersville, Pa., for luncheon at an old inn; a walk in Hopewell; fragrant new-mown hay…sweet clover…the usual placid beauty of hills, farms, horses in fields, a flawless sky…perfect summer day…perfect birthday. Ray gave me some very nice perfume, for which I thanked him sweetly. (Not mentioning that he’d given me perfume for Christmas—though, happily, not the same perfume.)
…Working on a story I like a little better than I thought I would, at the start: “Presque Isle.” (Almost an island.) Nearly all day yesterday, obsessed with the motion of the story, the dialogue; and then—what a disappointment!—to see how fast it reads. Thinking too of another Marya story […] What I want to achieve for Marya is the complexity of a life…the resistance of simplification. But when anyone approaches my writing, even well-intentioned and sympathetic critics, what happens immediately?—reduction, simplification, “theme,” “symbol”!
…Perhaps it is art itself, the very activity of art, that defeats our hopes for being understood. Selecting, emphasizing, imposing a structure upon random (seemingly random) events…and then the critic, the “professional reader,” comes along and imposes an additional structure, reducing everything yet again…!
[…]
…The unreal nature of “growing old”—that is, “growing older.” Anyone in his twenties would be appalled, even mystified, at the thought of being forty-one; and yet when one is forty-one, it’s hardly an accomplishment, it feels like nothing much. And then I see myself in mirrors, and in recent snapshots […] and I don’t appear greatly changed.
…Our problem, Ray’s and mine: we tend to be happy, inertly happy, wherever we are. And so, how can we possibly even consider returning to Windsor? Is it the case that we might really—someday—in another year or two—return?[…]
June 20, 1979…. Working, hour upon hour, at “Marya & Sylvester.”* Which I like very much. Very much. It is probably the strongest, the most succinct, of the Marya stories so far; I’ve deliberately sacrificed density, in this version at least, for a faster narrative movement. And then too everything will be rewritten…. It made me rather nervous, typing out the words “Princeton University.” Should I have done that, or should I have left the university anonymous…? I imagined Walt Litz reading it. Walt, the chairman of the department, whom I like very much; whom everyone likes. Do I really want to do this, and jeopardize my own position here…. Well…. I seem to have done it…. It had to be, however unwise.
[…]
…Marya & Sylvester. The “harassed” woman. Persecuted, tormented. Of course she is just as persecuted and tormented by the men who have academic power over her, but I want this parallel to be subtle, very subtle, very subtle…. The image of the urine: male marking: the arrogant cigarette butt, the quasi-affectiona
te torture. By cutting a great deal I must later work into the longer narrative the story emerges, I think, quite powerfully. I feel oddly moved, even rather upset, by it…by the final scenes with Sylvester and the “chairman of the English Department”…and the unflushed toilet.
…(In real life, our janitor, X, whose name I have forgotten, only left cigarette butts in my toilet. And the window open—once. Perhaps he did go through my desk, I don’t know…he did call me “Joyce” familiarly and a little drunkenly, once…and he was behaving oddly around Maxine…but Marya’s adventure is purely Marya’s, and a hideous one it is.)
July 1, 1979.…Working on “Canal Road.”* Have finished revisions on Bellefleur. (Henry [Robbins] came out to lunch on Thursday, and stayed the afternoon; a lovely visit. He is a lovely man. His suggestions re. Bellefleur are helpful ones, mainly involving some tightening or deletion of “digressive” chapters. Which of course is easy to do. Reading through that “long lurid gothic” I became newly excited about it—its energies, its people, the range of its freedom, the very rhythm of a typical tale—so different from the tone of the Marya stories and their “naturalistic” basis.) Now it appears that Bellefleur might be published in spring of 1980!—amazing. And Unholy Loves in Oct. 1979. I believe that this is too soon, there are already too many of my books flooding the market (or not flooding it—which is more accurate) but Henry doesn’t agree. At any rate Dutton, and Henry Robbins, would “publish” the book with more fanfare than Vanguard publishes their books.
…My love for Bellefleur is such that, yes, I suppose I do want to see it safely out…bound, in hardcover…published. In the world. For better or worse. In order for this to transpire I must accept, with as much good humor as possible, the reviewers’ inevitable misunderstandings and barbs and, no doubt, dismissals as well: but I’m sure I am equal to it. After all I do have the hide of a rhino….
[…]
July 11, 1979. […] This journal, I suppose, doesn’t give an adequate account of my life, my interior life; the way in which my day unfolds; the odd ways in which it is variously interrupted. To say that I am “always” writing the Marya story is poetically though not literally true…and when I am thinking about it, rather than actually working on it, I feel oddly uneasy, guilty, incomplete. Yet the pondering-upon Marya is certainly as important as the actual writing…. I would think, at the age of forty-one, that I might have come to a kind of ceasefire agreement with myself…or one of my “selves”…that thinking is not only equal to working but necessary, passionately necessary; that it must precede the actual writing. Yet I am touched with guilt…not greatly…I suppose mildly…it annoys me the way a mosquito’s whining would annoy…not serious, certainly not profound, but distressing; vexing. I want, yet do not want, to finish with Marya. To rid my imagination of her. Yet I feel that, in a sense, I should stay with her more or less permanently…fusing her life with my own. (But I can’t. It wouldn’t work. Shouldn’t. For Marya and I are not the same person.)
July 14, 1979.…The headachey delirium of one day (yesterday, for instance, when I wrote hour upon hour upon hour, all day long, until 10 P.M.), the detachment of the next (today, for instance, when I revised and coolly rearranged what I’d done in yesterday’s debauch)…. Quite clearly I require the poor struggling creature who writes until her head swims and her eyesight blotches and she can barely remember who she is…though I much prefer the activity of today…sorting things out, retyping pages, Xing out passages, in general having a thoroughly enjoyable time with Marya and her fate.
[…]
…Marya’s house, Marya’s fate. A frenetic outburst of ideas. One after another after another. Yesterday, absolutely drained; today, totally revived; and now it is late afternoon and the manuscript is more or less complete…350 pages approximately…the trajectory of a life-in-progress…quite unlike anything I’ve done before. Marya creates herself, she isn’t passively created by others. (As one might predict for her, given the sordid background of her life: the father’s death, mother’s drunkenness, etc.) It isn’t simply that I believe that one can create one’s life—I have done it myself—I am a witness. The will doesn’t reside in everyone, of course, and many are broken, but there is the possibility…the glorious hope…the “fate” that is self.
July 18, 1979.…Sitting at the glass-topped dining room table, signing colophons for Herb Yellin. “Queen of the Night,” which I still like very much. Outside it is raining. The pond is immense once again, the mewing catbirds are temporarily stilled (what a contingent of them!—waking us up early each morning), exquisitely beautiful music on the phonograph: Mendelssohn’s Seven [Characteristic] Pieces…played by Rena Kyriakou; and then Ravel’s Valses nobles & sentimentales played by Abbey Simon; and some Chopin selections, a new recording by one Yakov Flier (a Soviet pianist, the name unknown to me). Lovely heartbreaking Polonaise #2. I find that I’ve stopped signing “Joyce Carol Oates” and am only listening, staring sightlessly at the table.
…Yesterday, immensely active: to New York City on a morning train, delivered the revised manuscript of Bellefleur to Henry, walked uptown to 58th St., had lunch at Thursdays, walked then to the Metropolitan, saw “Treasures from the Kremlin” and nineteenth-and twentieth-century landscape drawings (in the beautiful Herbert Lehman wing: so beautiful that when we entered it, coming out of the dim, rather dank medieval hall in the old building, our hearts soared—and then the skylight, the glass roof, my God!)…and some lovely paintings…House Behind Trees of Braque’s which I would have sworn was a Matisse…and a beautiful Matisse nearby…and, and…! So much, so very much. After the museum, walked back to 666 Fifth Ave., where we had a leisurely and very chatty and relaxed two-hour cocktail visit with Bob [Phillips] at the Top of the Sixes […].
…Completed Marya: A Life. And now I am excluded from it. Rewrote a few pages this morning, worked on a new scene between Marya and Ian, decided suddenly that I didn’t want it, the novel (or book: it isn’t precisely a novel nor is it a collection of stories) doesn’t require it…so I threw it away…. And now my mind is drifting about. Wondering in which direction to plunge. The vast amounts of time, sheer time, one has when not furiously writing…! And I suppose turning Bellefleur in yesterday marks the end of another small epoch. (I have been revising that novel too, intermittently. A page here, a few pages there. Crossing things out. Tightening. Rewriting. And, alas, expanding…in places.) Now it’s over, delivered, and Marya too is over for the time being. Someday I will do a few things with the manuscript, blend in some facts, some information, the narrative in its present state could not accommodate; but my intuition tells me that, for the time being, Marya is completed and I am excluded and my imagination must swing elsewhere.
[…]
July 19, 1979. […] Since finishing Marya: A Life and delivering the manuscript of Bellefleur and rearranging some of the stories for Sunday Blues I seem to be inordinately “free”…my mind drifting here and there…unhurried, not exactly aimless…not yet uneasy with guilt…though certainly that will be coming. Such a vast world, unstructured, cheerfully gregarious, noisy, crowded, unpremeditated…. I open my mail, read a few lines in letters, let them fall, pick up another envelope and open it, what a babble, who are all these people! […]
…Walking about Princeton in the warm sunny air. Well—this is it. One comes to the center, the still point, and it’s as likely to be Princeton on July 19, 1979, as anywhere, any time. My mind darts about restlessly…here and there…poking into corners…prying…curious…inquisitive…insatiable…coming up with very little…but the process is fascinating. […] If I write the kind of story that interests me, it’s rather more like a novella than a story, and no magazine would be interested; and my mind irresistibly leaps to a larger structure: how would this fit into a more ambitious narrative, how would its subordinate characters manage in fictions of their own? And so one is confronted with a novel…another novel. And I can’t begin writing one, I simply can’t, not so soon after Marya, not so
soon….
[…]
July 21, 1979.…Thinking & taking notes…brooding…daydreaming (as we walked briskly across the bridge over the Delaware, at Washington Crossing; and later through Titusville) about a possible new novel. Angel of Light. (The allusion is to John Brown, and to Ashley Nichol’s “presence” in Maurie Halleck’s life after he saves him from drowning when they are both seventeen…and to Kristin Halleck’s role as angel/avenger in Ashley’s life.) The problem is of course that I have too many novels, too many books on the shelf now…jammed up like logs…ah well! Re-arranging Sunday Blues yesterday. Revising a few stray pages in Marya. (Adding background information for several of the stories, which should read more like “chapters” than independent “stories.”) But of course I am excluded from those worlds now. And must devise another.
The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates Page 37
